Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance

Walter Pagel was a historian of medicine, and this S. Karger monograph is his landmark scholarly study establishing that Paracelsus's medical writing rests on a serious, coherent philosophical and religious framework rather than being dismissed as mere alchemical eccentricity, as earlier historians of medicine had often treated it. Its strength is that Pagel situates Paracelsus within Renaissance natural philosophy and Christian mysticism on their own terms, a reading that reshaped how the history of medicine subsequently treated him. Its limit is its age: the book is now a mid-twentieth century study, so a claim about the current state of Paracelsus scholarship should be checked against more recent work alongside this foundational study.