But the revival of learning awakened in men at first a suspicion and at last a conviction that the ancients had left something which could be reached by independent research, and gradually the paralytic-like torpor passed away.
(3) Miall: The Early Naturalists, London, 1912.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did three things in medicine--shattered authority, laid the foundation of an accurate knowledge of the structure of the human body and demonstrated how its functions should be studied intelligently--with which advances, as illustrating this period, may be associated the names of Paracelsus, Vesalius and Harvey.
PARACELSUS PARACELSUS is "der Geist der stets verneint." He roused men against the dogmatism of the schools, and he stimulated enormously the practical study of chemistry.

These are his great merits, against which must be placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental medicine, some his own, some foisted in his name, the influence of which is still with us.
"With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged to you again" is the verdict of three centuries on Paracelsus.

In return for unmeasured abuse of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been held up to obloquy as the arch-charlatan of history.

We have taken a cheap estimate of him from Fuller and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers who debased or perverted his writings.

Fuller( 4) picked him out as exemplifying the drunken quack, whose body was a sea wherein the tide of drunkenness was ever ebbing and flowing--"He boasted that shortly he would order Luther and the Pope, as well as he had done Galen and Hippocrates.