"Now at this time," he declares, "I, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bombast, Monarch of the Arcana, was endowed by God with special gifts for this end, that every searcher after this supreme philosopher's work may be forced to imitate and to follow me, be he Italian, Pole, Gaul, German, or whatsoever or whosoever he be.

Come hither after me, all ye philosophers, astronomers, and spagirists....

I will show and open to you...

this corporeal regeneration."(1) Paracelsus based his medical teachings on four "pillars"-- philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue of the physician--a strange-enough equipment surely, and yet, properly interpreted, not quite so anomalous as it seems at first blush.

Philosophy was the "gate of medicine," whereby the physician entered rightly upon the true course of learning; astronomy, the study of the stars, was all-important because "they (the stars) caused disease by their exhalations, as, for instance, the sun by excessive heat"; alchemy, as he interpreted it, meant the improvement of natural substances for man's benefit; while virtue in the physician was necessary since "only the virtuous are permitted to penetrate into the innermost nature of man and the universe." All his writings aim to promote progress in medicine, and to hold before the physician a grand ideal of his profession.