Paracelsus

Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), known as Paracelsus, was a physician and philosopher of the German Renaissance who staked medicine on observation rather than inherited authority. Born at Einsiedeln, Schwyz, he learned medicine from his father, took his doctorate at Ferrara in 1515 or 1516, and served as an army surgeon.

In 1526 he reportedly cured the Basel printer Johann Froben. In 1527 he became city physician of Basel, lecturing at the university in German rather than Latin, and on 23 June burned Avicenna's Canon of Medicine in the market square, telling students that ‘the patients are your textbook’.

His attacks on other physicians drove him from Basel in 1528. In Nuremberg he called guaiac wood useless against syphilis, and the Leipzig faculty banned his book on the disease. He published his Great Surgery Book in 1536 and died at Salzburg in September 1541.