The French Paracelsians
The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France

A 1992 account of the prolonged struggle between Paracelsians and Galenists, and its significance for the scientific revolution.

Allen George Debus (Author)

9780521400497, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 October 1991

266 pages, 25 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

"...a welcome addition to Allen Debus' studies of the Paracelsian tradition in early modern Europe....As a work of intellectual history, this book is successful. Debus agilely traces the complex development of French Paracelsianism showing its relation to humanist medicine, to Protestantism, and to the new philosophy." William Eamon, Renaissance Quarterly

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is normally characterised in terms of astronomy and the physics of motion. In The French Paracelsians, first published in 1992, Allen Debus narrates an important episode whose contribution to the scientific revolution has been largely ignored: the long-standing contention between Paracelsians and Galenists. Shortly after the medical authority of Galen had been re-established during the Renaissance, Paracelsus, a Swiss-German firebrand, proposed a new approach to natural philosophy and medicine - through chemistry. The resulting debate between Paracelsians and Galenists lasted more than a century, embroiling medical establishments across Europe. In France the debate was particularly bitter, with the Medical Faculty in Paris determined to keep out of all fields of chemistry medicine. Debus elucidates this important polemic, not only in regard to Paracelsian pharmaceutical chemistry and clinical cosmology, but also the development of chemical physiology, and its struggle with seventeenth-century medicine dominated by mechanical philosophy.

Preface
List of illustrations
1. Paracelsism and medical tradition
2. Chemistry and medicine in France: the early years
3. Paris and Montpellier: the great chemical debates
4. Chemical continuity and the new philosophy
5. Alchemy and the chemical philosophers in the early eighteenth century
6. Postscript
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX]