The Devil's Doctor

By Philip Ball,

Book cover of The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

Book description

Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern; a name that is familiar but a man who has been hard to perceive or understand. Contemporary of Luther, enemy of established medicine, scourge of the universities ('at…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Devil's Doctor as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Paracelsus was a man centuries ahead of his time.

The father of allopathic medicine, the father of toxicology, and an iconoclast who encouraged doctors to listen to women knowledgeable in healing arts and who encouraged women to understand the workings of their own bodies rather than blindly accepting the proclamations of male docs, he also came within a hair’s breadth of enunciating the principles of segregation of alleles and of dominance and recession – three centuries before Mendel. 

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