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Author: Philip Ball ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF
Download for free medical books PRETITLE The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Author: Philip Ball ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDFPhilippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus, stands at the cusp of medieval and modern times. A contemporary of Luther, an enemy of the medical establishment, a scourge of the universities, an alchemist, an army surgeon, and a radical theologian, he attracted myths even before he died. His fantastic journeys across Europe and beyond were said to be made on a magical white horse, and he was rumored to carry the elixir of life in the pommel of his great broadsword. His name was linked with Faust, who bargained with the devil.
Who was the man behind these stories? Some have accused him of being a charlatan, a windbag who filled his books with wild speculations and invented words. Others claim him as the father of modern medicine. Philip Ball exposes a more complex truth in The Devil's Doctor—one that emerges only by entering into Paracelsus’s time. He explores the intellectual, political, and religious undercurrents of the sixteenth century and looks at how doctors really practiced, at how people traveled, and at how wars were fought. For Paracelsus was a product of an age of change and strife, of renaissance and reformation. And yet by uniting the diverse disciplines of medicine, biology, and alchemy, he assisted, almost in spite of himself, in the birth of science and the emergence of the age of rationalism.
Direct download links available for PRETITLE The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science POSTTITLE
- File Size: 3222 KB
- Print Length: 448 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 18, 2006)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005EYXC20
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,411 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science PDF
The voluminous study written by P. Ball bears evident mark of his profession, that is of his being physicist. One has to appreciat how many historical topics he was able to cover in his book, less impressive is, nevertheless, his ability to discover the most important ones and to explain Paracelsus thought on the ground of the historical context so carefully described. Author's basic despise -- at least that's what I feel in his book -- for questions of theology and religion that, according to him, have at best a historical importance seems to prevent him from better understanding of real problems of Paracelsus, and even of real meaning of his "magic". Well, according to the title, Ball wanted to describe Paracelsus in the context of the "renaissance magic and science", yet this picture would be, and is, distorted if the effort is not made to understand the complex of his thought from his perspective, to find out what for him is important.
Another thing is that Ball works only with english anthologies and even, if I'm not mistaken, only with english written sources in general. Sure, it's not very easy to read Paracelsus in the original Swiss German dialect, yet to me it seems inevitable if one wants to get out of beaten tracks of long rooted, sometimes superficial opinions, and to get inside the text and thoughts.
So, if you want to read a reliable and better balanced study on Paracelsus' natural philosophy as well as on his theology (and you are not craving for an "esoteric" interpretation) read rather Andrew Weeks' nicely short monograph on Paracelsus and keep reservation about Ball's book: historically he seems to have found the proper sources to use, but systematically he's then not going deep enough to discover the "real" Paracelsus.
Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim came from the time of Erasmus, Luther, and Copernicus, and was in his way as influential as those giants, but he is hardly remembered now. Even by the name Paracelsus, which he took following the fashion of the humanists of his day to Latinize their names, he is unknown to most, though he makes personal appearances in the writings of Browning, Borges, Jung, and even A. J. Rowling, and his personal characteristics have been encompassed in the characters of Faust and Prospero. He wrote many books, almost none of which appeared during his lifetime, full of weird attempts to connect everything in the universe with everything else. He understood that matter was permeated by spirit, and that there were influences on both by astral bodies. His writings of occult science and theology are full of secret signs and symbols and neologisms that have defied any subsequent explanation. You don't have to try to get through his books; Philip Ball has done so, and seems to have absorbed every other aspect of medieval and Renaissance thought, to produce _The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A big, generous, and detailed look at this alchemist's life and times, and importantly his way of thinking, Ball's book is continually surprising about the man, the reactions to him, and his influence.
One of Paracelsus's biggest achievements is that he did renounce the reliance on Aristotle and Galen; he insisted on finding out for himself what was true and not being bound by the prior abstract arguments of what had to be true. He was thus skeptical of the main currents of thought in cosmology and medicine, and in favor of learning from experience.
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