Paracelsus was an alchemist and physician from the 1400’s. He was a very unusual character, accused of being a drunkard and and a knave by many upstanding citizens in many countries in and about Europe. He happens to be one of my favorite characters, mostly because he said that you can make a “little man”–a homonculous–by mixing human semen with putrefied “venter equinus” (horse manure) for forty days:
After this time it will be in some degree like a human being, but, nevertheless, transparent and without body. If now, after this, it be every day nourished and fed cautiously and prudently with the arcanum of human blood, and kept for forty weeks in the perpetual and equal heat of a venter equinus, it becomes, thenceforth, a true and living infant, having all the members of a child that is born from a woman, but much smaller. This we call a homunculus; and it should be afterwards educated with the greatest care and zeal, until it grows up and begins to display intelligence.
I’m not making this up. It comes from a book called De Natura Rerum, written by Paracelsus. He wasn’t the only one either. Thomas Aquinas, Jabir the Kufan alchemist from the Middle Ages, Avicenna, and poor, poor Goethe’s Faust all putrefied stuff in glass jugs to make creepy little people who helped them with the house work.
Besides all that though, Paracelsus was a successful doctor (by the successful doctor measure of 1450, that meant that half of the people he treated lived to trill the fife another day). He had the unfortunate habit, however, of irritating his colleagues until they ran him out of town. Which brings back me to the topic of today’s blog…excrement.
In chapter 11 of The Devil’s Doctor, Philip Ball describes a scene in which Paracelsus announced to the doctors of Basle that he wanted to reveal to them the greatest of medical secrets. The doctors gathered in the finery afforded the physicians of the day, silk and feathers flowing. Paracelsus stood before them with a covered dish:
As he held up [the] dish and revealed its contents, the assembled crowd was confronted with steaming human excrement. Predictably, they stormed from the hall in outrage, pursued by Paracelsus’s accusations: ‘If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation, you are unworthy of the name of physicians!’ But it was not all calculated insult; Paracelsus genuinely believed that ‘decay is the beginning of all birth’ –and that all health, for ‘that which prevents putrefaction also will prevent health.’
Life is a series of sublimated putrefications. Let it be.
One Foot Walking 