The last owner of this book spent his career trying to measure evil. Michael H. Stone (1933–2023), professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and the forensic psychiatrist behind the twenty-two-point Gradations of Evil scale, kept a working library on the darker end of the human record, and this enormous Paracelsus was a part of it. The pairing makes sense. Paracelsus was the physician who taught that the difference between a medicine and a poison is a matter of quantity, and who insisted that a doctor who does not understand the whole cosmos does not understand the patient either.
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, arrived in Basel in 1527 as city physician and lecturer at the university, and within the year had thrown Avicenna's Canon, the reigning textbook of European medicine, onto the students' St. John's Day bonfire. That was his career in miniature. He lectured in German when the rules said Latin, admitted barber-surgeons to lectures reserved for gowned doctors, and insisted that medicine had to be learned from nature, from miners and midwives and from the sick body itself. Along the way he gave medicine its founding rule of toxicology, that the dose makes the poison, and gave alchemy new marching orders: the point of the art was to make medicines, and to forget about the gold. He died at Salzburg in 1541 having seen almost none of his own writing into print.
The books came later. At his death the work lay scattered among patrons and disciples, and a generation passed before a circle of physician-alchemists went hunting for the papers and built the printed corpus out of what they found. The hunt culminated in Johann Huser's Basel edition of 1589–91, the textual cornerstone, and the whole tradition then flowed into the volume offered here: the Geneva edition of 1658, prepared by the physician Friedrich Bitiskius for the brothers Jean Antoine and Samuel de Tournes. This is the most comprehensive Latin collected edition of Paracelsus ever produced, and the form in which Europe outside the German lands read him for the next two centuries, issued at the high-water mark of Paracelsianism as a European movement.
The contents run the full span. Here are the Paragranum and the Paramirum, the theoretical heart of his medicine, where the physician's four pillars are philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue. Here is the doctrine of the tria prima, salt, sulfur, and mercury, the three principles out of which all bodies are composed, which governed chymical thinking for a century and a half. Here are the Paradoxa, the surgical works that made his lifetime reputation, and the treatises on mining sickness, on the mineral waters, and on the invisible diseases. And here are the magical works: the Archidoxis magica with its planetary sigils and its talismans cast for particular diseases and particular hours, page after page of engraved seals, together with the treatises on images, characters, and the powers folded into stones and herbs. Though it should be said that several of the magical treatises are of debated authenticity, hung on the master's name by enthusiastic followers, which is itself a measure of how important that name had become. The corpus, genuine and grafted alike, became a foundation stone of esoteric medicine and of early chemistry and pharmacology.
This is the whole thing in one piece: three parts, each with its divisional title, gathered into a single thick folio, the title printed in red and black and the engraved portrait of Paracelsus bound opposite. The portrait, after Tintoretto and engraved by François Chauveau, carries the motto Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest, let no man belong to another who can belong to himself, which is about as close to a Paracelsian creed as a single line gets. The portrait is present in this copy. The book is in its contemporary parchment over boards, blind-tooled with a center ornament, sewn on five raised bands, with an old black label lettered PARACELSI OPERA OMNIA and a second label below it lettered GENEVA 1680, which is wrong by twenty-two years and has been wrong on this spine for a very long time.
It is a well-read copy. The front joint is cracked, the parchment is dry and lifting at the head of the spine, the boards are rubbed at the edges, and the title leaf is chipped and creased in the margins. Inside, the paper is heavy and clean, with clear impressions of the red-and-black title and the seals of the Archidoxis. It is also enormous, near fourteen inches tall and a hand's width thick, and we do not recommend lifting it casually.
Provenance: (1) An unidentified eighteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate, with coronet and monogram cipher, inside the front board. (2) Bookseller's ticket of Libreria Antiquaria Bourlot, Turin, founded 1848. (3) Bookplate of Kenneth Edwin McMullen. (4) The psychiatry collection of Dr. Michael H. Stone (1933–2023), Columbia University.
PARACELSUS (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493/94–1541); Friedrich BITISKIUS, editor. Aur. Philip. Theoph. Paracelsi Bombast ab Hohenheim, medici et philosophi celeberrimi, chemicorumque principis, Opera omnia medico-chemico-chirurgica, tribus voluminibus comprehensa. Editio novissima et emendatissima, ad Germanica & Latina exemplaria accuratissime collata. Geneva: sumptibus Ioan. Antonii & Samuelis de Tournes, 1658.
Physical Description: Thick folio, approximately 35 x 21 cm (13 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches). Collation: a blank leaf, then 17 unnumbered preliminary leaves; Volume I, 828 pp. followed by 20 leaves of index; Volume II, 718 pp. followed by 16 leaves of index; Volume III in two sections, the Chirurgia Magna 212 pp. followed by 14 leaves of index and the Chirurgia Minor or Bertheonea 119 pp. followed by 4 leaves of index; and at the end the Dictionariolum Paracelsicum, 18 pp., without index. Complete, each volume and section carrying its own divisional title page and its own contents list. Engraved portrait frontispiece after Tintoretto, engraved by François Chauveau, bound opposite the general title; general title printed in red and black with a large engraved device; woodcut and engraved diagrams, tables and sigils throughout, most densely in the Archidoxis magica.
Binding: Contemporary full parchment over boards, blind-tooled with a center ornament, spine on five raised bands with a black gilt-lettered morocco label reading PARACELSI OPERA OMNIA and a second label lettered GENEVA 1680.
Condition: Front joint cracked. Parchment dry, with lifting and splitting at the head of the spine and rubbing to the board edges. Title leaf chipped and creased in the margins. Scattered light browning and marginal soiling; text and plates clean and legible throughout.
References: Sudhoff 381–383. Caillet 8283. Ferguson II, 169. Krivatsy 8560. Bibliotheca Osleriana 528. Verginelli, Bibliotheca Hermetica, 243–244.
The last owner of this book spent his career trying to measure evil. Michael H. Stone (1933–2023), professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and the forensic psychiatrist behind the twenty-two-point Gradations of Evil scale, kept a working library on the darker end of the human record, and this enormous Paracelsus was a part of it. The pairing makes sense. Paracelsus was the physician who taught that the difference between a medicine and a poison is a matter of quantity, and who insisted that a doctor who does not understand the whole cosmos does not understand the patient either.
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, arrived in Basel in 1527 as city physician and lecturer at the university, and within the year had thrown Avicenna's Canon, the reigning textbook of European medicine, onto the students' St. John's Day bonfire. That was his career in miniature. He lectured in German when the rules said Latin, admitted barber-surgeons to lectures reserved for gowned doctors, and insisted that medicine had to be learned from nature, from miners and midwives and from the sick body itself. Along the way he gave medicine its founding rule of toxicology, that the dose makes the poison, and gave alchemy new marching orders: the point of the art was to make medicines, and to forget about the gold. He died at Salzburg in 1541 having seen almost none of his own writing into print.
The books came later. At his death the work lay scattered among patrons and disciples, and a generation passed before a circle of physician-alchemists went hunting for the papers and built the printed corpus out of what they found. The hunt culminated in Johann Huser's Basel edition of 1589–91, the textual cornerstone, and the whole tradition then flowed into the volume offered here: the Geneva edition of 1658, prepared by the physician Friedrich Bitiskius for the brothers Jean Antoine and Samuel de Tournes. This is the most comprehensive Latin collected edition of Paracelsus ever produced, and the form in which Europe outside the German lands read him for the next two centuries, issued at the high-water mark of Paracelsianism as a European movement.
The contents run the full span. Here are the Paragranum and the Paramirum, the theoretical heart of his medicine, where the physician's four pillars are philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and virtue. Here is the doctrine of the tria prima, salt, sulfur, and mercury, the three principles out of which all bodies are composed, which governed chymical thinking for a century and a half. Here are the Paradoxa, the surgical works that made his lifetime reputation, and the treatises on mining sickness, on the mineral waters, and on the invisible diseases. And here are the magical works: the Archidoxis magica with its planetary sigils and its talismans cast for particular diseases and particular hours, page after page of engraved seals, together with the treatises on images, characters, and the powers folded into stones and herbs. Though it should be said that several of the magical treatises are of debated authenticity, hung on the master's name by enthusiastic followers, which is itself a measure of how important that name had become. The corpus, genuine and grafted alike, became a foundation stone of esoteric medicine and of early chemistry and pharmacology.
This is the whole thing in one piece: three parts, each with its divisional title, gathered into a single thick folio, the title printed in red and black and the engraved portrait of Paracelsus bound opposite. The portrait, after Tintoretto and engraved by François Chauveau, carries the motto Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest, let no man belong to another who can belong to himself, which is about as close to a Paracelsian creed as a single line gets. The portrait is present in this copy. The book is in its contemporary parchment over boards, blind-tooled with a center ornament, sewn on five raised bands, with an old black label lettered PARACELSI OPERA OMNIA and a second label below it lettered GENEVA 1680, which is wrong by twenty-two years and has been wrong on this spine for a very long time.
It is a well-read copy. The front joint is cracked, the parchment is dry and lifting at the head of the spine, the boards are rubbed at the edges, and the title leaf is chipped and creased in the margins. Inside, the paper is heavy and clean, with clear impressions of the red-and-black title and the seals of the Archidoxis. It is also enormous, near fourteen inches tall and a hand's width thick, and we do not recommend lifting it casually.
Provenance: (1) An unidentified eighteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate, with coronet and monogram cipher, inside the front board. (2) Bookseller's ticket of Libreria Antiquaria Bourlot, Turin, founded 1848. (3) Bookplate of Kenneth Edwin McMullen. (4) The psychiatry collection of Dr. Michael H. Stone (1933–2023), Columbia University.
PARACELSUS (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493/94–1541); Friedrich BITISKIUS, editor. Aur. Philip. Theoph. Paracelsi Bombast ab Hohenheim, medici et philosophi celeberrimi, chemicorumque principis, Opera omnia medico-chemico-chirurgica, tribus voluminibus comprehensa. Editio novissima et emendatissima, ad Germanica & Latina exemplaria accuratissime collata. Geneva: sumptibus Ioan. Antonii & Samuelis de Tournes, 1658.
Physical Description: Thick folio, approximately 35 x 21 cm (13 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches). Collation: a blank leaf, then 17 unnumbered preliminary leaves; Volume I, 828 pp. followed by 20 leaves of index; Volume II, 718 pp. followed by 16 leaves of index; Volume III in two sections, the Chirurgia Magna 212 pp. followed by 14 leaves of index and the Chirurgia Minor or Bertheonea 119 pp. followed by 4 leaves of index; and at the end the Dictionariolum Paracelsicum, 18 pp., without index. Complete, each volume and section carrying its own divisional title page and its own contents list. Engraved portrait frontispiece after Tintoretto, engraved by François Chauveau, bound opposite the general title; general title printed in red and black with a large engraved device; woodcut and engraved diagrams, tables and sigils throughout, most densely in the Archidoxis magica.
Binding: Contemporary full parchment over boards, blind-tooled with a center ornament, spine on five raised bands with a black gilt-lettered morocco label reading PARACELSI OPERA OMNIA and a second label lettered GENEVA 1680.
Condition: Front joint cracked. Parchment dry, with lifting and splitting at the head of the spine and rubbing to the board edges. Title leaf chipped and creased in the margins. Scattered light browning and marginal soiling; text and plates clean and legible throughout.
References: Sudhoff 381–383. Caillet 8283. Ferguson II, 169. Krivatsy 8560. Bibliotheca Osleriana 528. Verginelli, Bibliotheca Hermetica, 243–244.
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