Paracelsus and the Doctrine of Signatures

16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus was frustrated with established medical practice and academia and he was sometimes on the lam because of his beliefs. He wrote at length about the idea that items in the natural world carried “signatures” in their appearance that could tell you visually how they could be used medicinally.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:08Holly Frey?

  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Veeve Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune into Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:08Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:18Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:24Holly Frey?

  This is a topic that actually came up on another show that I work on occasionally called Our Skin. And here's the thing, I was trying to do calendar math and it hurt my heart and my brain.

• 2:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh no.

• 2:37Holly Frey?

  Because I can't figure out when that one is coming out in relation to when this show will come out.

• 2:43Holly Frey?

  Listen, I'm not the boss of the schedule on that one, so I don't know what's going on. But it's, there's no overlap other than the mention of the doctrine of signatures and a little bit of talk about it. But it ended up being a thing where I was like, you know, we should probably talk about that because I don't know that we have. And there's some things. And then this ended up being a lot about Paracelsus because he is important in the history of medicine. He's mentioned in a lot of our previous episodes.

• 3:13Holly Frey?

  There hasn't really been an episode focused on him and his life was super interesting. He was a very rebellious person who was very frustrated with established medical practice and academia. And he was sometimes on the lam because of his beliefs, which is pretty fun. I love that if you read biographies of him, it's like, and then he spent a period of wandering, but then other accounts will be more detailed and be like, oh yeah, he got kicked out.

• 3:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then he was on the run.

• 3:40Holly Frey?

  And then, or not even, in some cases, like we mentioned one in this episode where he was actually wanted for a rest. But in others, it was just like, everybody's real sick of you, Paracelsus. You might want to get out of town. But so I ended up very much down the rabbit hole of him because he is one of the people who really, really set up this idea of signatures. He's not the first to have the idea, but he really expounded on it. He wrote a lot about it. And so it makes sense to talk about him right alongside the doctrine of signatures. So today we are going to talk about his life and work specifically as it related to the doctrine of signatures.

• 4:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Before we humans understood the science behind how the body functioned, which I mean, that's something we are still figuring out.

• 4:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  But before we really had the concept of things like evidence-based medicine, there was the doctrine of signatures. And that name makes it sound like a book or a tract. Of course, there have been books and tracts written about it, but that's not anything physical, it's a concept. The idea is that you could intuit the things from nature that might heal a given medical problem by finding ways in which those items from the natural world resembled the ailing part of the body. So the signature of a plant in this ideology is in its physical presentation.

• 5:11Holly Frey?

  And as to where all of this began, it's almost impossible to pinpoint. We'll talk a little bit more about some theories later, but for one, this concept of a plant's appearance giving a clue as to its possible use kind of sprang up in multiple world cultures over the centuries. And a second problem in tracing the roots of this idea lies in the fact that this was the type of information that typically was passed down through oral tradition by people who may have been considered healers in their communities, but not necessarily doctors or any other profession that would have routinely made notes about their work. There were occasional mentions of it. Dioscorides wrote in the first century C.E., quote, "The herb scorpion resembles the tail

• 5:56Holly Frey?

  of the scorpion and is good against his biting." That is a classic example of the type of association that was being used to identify what people believed might treat a problem.

• 6:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the Western world, 16th century physician Paracelsus is often invoked as perhaps not the originator of this concept, but certainly a proponent of it, and also as somebody who codified it. Like the terminology of signatures kind of comes about in or around his lifetime. We'll kind of set the stage by talking about him and his work. Paracelsus was born Philippus Ariolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Honheim in Ainsiden, Sweden, in 1493. And as a boy, he did go by the name Theophrastus.

• 6:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  His father Wilhelm was a doctor and a chemist, and his mother Elsa Osnar died when Theophrastus was still a young child. He and his father moved to Austria, where his father had gotten an appointment as the town physician for Vilak.

• 7:04Holly Frey?

  There, Theophrastus was educated in metal mining with the intention that as he matured, he would work in an administrative role in the mining industry of Vilak, Austria. So keep in mind, this education, of course, would have been a bit misguided. At the time, the idea of transmutation of base metals into gold was still considered a viable possibility, and people also believed that metals grew underground, kind of like plants. But what Theophrastus noticed was that a lot of the people who worked in the mines also had medical problems.

• 7:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  Theophrastus did not go into the mining business, although that education would come into play later. He went to the University of Vienna, starting in 1509, and studied math there, as well as astrology and medicine. After a year, which was considered a completion of his coursework, he moved to the University of Ferrara in Italy to get a medical degree. From the age of 14, he knew he was called to a life in medicine, and he chose the name Paracelsus around 1516, shortly after graduating. This offers an indication that he intended to build on the work of Roman physician Alice Cornelius Celcius, who lived in the first century, both BCE and CE.

• 8:23Holly Frey?

  He also started kind of wandering Europe in search of more knowledge, and this was not entirely uncommon at the time. There had been an explosion of universities in the Middle Ages, and the printing press had been invented several decades earlier. And as a consequence, this was a time when a lot of young thinkers kind of chose to sample from multiple schools to gain a broad knowledge base and also kind of seek a place that felt right to maybe settle down and start a life. Theophrastus spent time at many universities throughout Germany, Austria, and Italy, but he came away finding the educations that they offered pretentious and unsatisfying.

• 9:02Holly Frey?

  He famously wrote, "I wonder how the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses."

• 9:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Paracelsus also found schools to be pretty useless for getting an education for the medical vocation. He felt that a university setting just didn't offer all the information that a doctor would actually need in their day-to-day practice, so he sought out other sources of information, and he came to the conclusion that he could learn more from everyday people who dealt with maladies as part of their lives than he could from academics. He mentions in his writings, speaking with old wives, sorcerers, travelers, innkeepers, monks, barbers, alchemists, and even gangs of bandits to learn what practices they found to be beneficial.

• 9:54Holly Frey?

  In 1524, he returned to Villar to visit his father before moving north to Salzburg. That was where he planned to start practicing medicine. But his plan in Salzburg got derailed by the German peasants' war. This event could be its own episode, but for the purposes of context for Paracelsus, in this uprising, peasants formed armies to fight against the aristocracy, which was having its own conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. But the moves that the aristocracy was making for its own benefit were only going to hurt the peasant class, and it would actually push them from the status of vassals, having some ownership of the land, to more of a debt bondage serfdom position. And given what we said about Paracelsus

• 10:38Holly Frey?

  already, it's probably no surprise to anyone that he sided with the peasants. But the peasants were really not equipped to fight a war, and the aristocracy quickly defeated them, killing an estimated 100,000 people in the process, although some estimates put that number a good bit higher. And Paracelsus survived this conflict, but because of his alliance to the peasants, there was a warrant out for his arrest, and so he fled Salzburg.

• 11:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  This war came up in our episode on "Guts of the Iron Hand," which I only remembered just now, as we are sitting here, even though that is an episode that I researched and wrote. So if you want more about that, you can go listen to the "Guts of the Iron Hand" episode. We'll pick up more with Paracelsus's life after this uprising, after a sponsor break.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 11:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  It could rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 12:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 12:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  With the fan's experience, it's incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 12:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 12:30Speaker 05

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 12:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard,

• 13:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 14:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 15:22Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented, based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 15:40Holly Frey?

  After fleeing Salzburg, Paracelsus lived in Strasbourg for a while before moving on to Basel, Switzerland. And in Basel, he had several successes that would help to establish his reputation as a doctor. First, he treated a man named Johann Froben for an infection in his leg that threatened that limb's future. It was believed, before Paracelsus got involved, that the only real option was amputation. But Paracelsus was able to save the leg by clearing up that infection and helping it heal. It is not entirely clear how he did this.

• 16:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Boy, am I curious, though.

• 16:17Holly Frey?

  Me too. I have a theory we can talk about on behind the scenes, but it's not a treatment I would wish on anybody.

• 16:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  All right. His next case involved a friend of Froben named Erasmus. Erasmus had an advanced case of gout, and for this, Paracelsus gave him laudanum. Some people say Paracelsus actually invented laudanum, although his exact recipe for it is unknown. It may differ from the modern definition of what laudanum is, which is a tincture composed of a 10% solution of opium powder dissolved in a high alcohol by volume spirit. Laudanum is not a cure for anything, although it is a very high-dose pain reliever. So high-dose

• 17:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  that, if part of their symptoms include pain especially, they might think they have been cured. Even though laudanum doesn't cure gout, Erasmus was declared cured, and Paracelsus was soon given the job of town doctor in Basel.

• 17:21Holly Frey?

  And in that role, he quickly used his status to share his opinions on the medical practice that had preceded him and just the medical establishment. In June of 1527, he distributed handbills that he was going to give a public speech. And when that day came, Paracelsus appeared in a black robe and hat with red golden trim, carrying a staff and sword. And he had an assistant with him who was carrying two large books. So this particular day of this speech was a day when Basel traditionally had a large public bonfire as part of the celebration of the Feast of St. John. That fire was part of a university event that they apparently had every year. And at this point, Paracelsus taught at the university.

• 18:05Holly Frey?

  It fell under his duties as Basel's town physician.

• 18:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  He sort of showboated for a moment before the crowd. And then Paracelsus reportedly threw off his hat and robe, broke his staff and threw the sword on the ground, saying that a doctor should appear before patients not in fancy clothes and adornment, but with knowledge. Then he threw one of the books on the fire, saying, "That was Galen." A second book went on to the fire and he said, "That was Avicenna." We've talked about Avicenna on the show, also called Ibn Sina, back in 2014. Paracelsus then continued this very scathing critique, quote, "Old bloodless words, vain mouthings of ignorance, Latin sounds meaning nothing.

• 18:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  From these books, your doctors get their Latin for diseases they know nothing about and their Greek for diseases they never heard of. Gray-bearded frauds, old wormy moth-eaten sophists, lousy pretenders with their fine clothes, their long steps, their Latin to hide their ignorance. They cling to the rich like leeches and let the poor die like flies. When there is a real disease, they fly from it, afraid for their reputations." Paracelsus also stated that the various cures that were frequently used just caused more problems than the disease they were meant to address and that all of this was about getting money, often from people who were being given false hope.

• 19:39Holly Frey?

  As you can imagine, this presentation did not go over well with any of his colleagues. He had at that point publicly sought to discredit not only his employers, but also his peers in academia. And while his push to learn from and care from the common people of the city seems very much like a feel-good moment, it was also deeply rooted in his own ego. So of course, he was correct to reject the belief put forth by Galen that the body was composed of four humors and that an imbalance in those humors was the source of disease. Like, he was rejecting things that were not founded in science. And he was extolling the virtues of looking to nature and the common people for cures.

• 20:22Holly Frey?

  But he was also pretty clear that he understood all of that way better than anyone else possibly could.

• 20:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, this is like such a similar attitude to like the wellness industry today saying, "Established doctors know nothing. We have all the answers."

• 20:40Holly Frey?

  Uh huh.

• 20:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Like, this was the same, the same thing kind of playing out centuries ago. Additionally, this meant that he considered things like fairies to be real and that different varieties of those fairies corresponded to the elements of earth, water, air, and fire, those being respectively gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders. He explained that these elementals were soulless spirits that were living in the matrices of each element.

• 21:12Holly Frey?

  And he wrote a lot about these entities and their lifestyles. He wrote so much, and I was reviewing so much that I was like having a hard time picking what I wanted to share. But this tickled me, so here we go. Of gnomes, he wrote, quote, "The lot of man is very hard. To hope or to wish will profit him nothing, and he must work for all he wants. But the gnomes have whatever they seek without any labor in getting or preparing it." Concerning their day and night, their sleeping and waking hours, the case is exactly the same with them as with men. Moreover, they have a sun and a firmament no less than we have. That is, the gnomes have the earth which is their chaos. This is to them only

• 21:55Holly Frey?

  as our atmosphere. It is not as earth to them in our sense. Hence, it follows that they see through the earth, just as we do through the air, and the sun shines for them through the earth as it does for us through the air, for they have the sun, the moon, and the whole firmament before their eyes. So, the four humors are bad, but y'all, gnomes are real and we need to pay attention.

• 22:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Four humors are bad, but four types of fairies are good. This whole idea of four earthly elements was grounded in alchemy. That was something that, as a boy, he had studied with his father and with other teachers. He also thought that ghosts were real, explaining them as sort of echoes of a human trapped on the earthly realm for a while after death. I feel like this is still a common way that people talk about ghosts. He was groundbreaking for his time, but also working with some really non-scientific ideas by modern standards. He also advocated that many of the spirits that the church had characterized as bad

• 23:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  were just these elementals, and they were scientific. And this too ruffled a lot of feathers in academic circles. He seems to have been really at odds with just about everybody in the town who could have been considered a professional colleague.

• 23:16Holly Frey?

  So, cut to 1528, by which point it was pretty clear that it was time for Paracelsus to leave Basel. He did not settle down for several years, and he kept moving around in part because people would get real tired of him. But he was also returning to the habit of his earlier years, where he kind of traveled and studied. Although at this time, he was not stopping in for study at universities. He instead observed real people and their medical issues, and he also, it seems, worked as or shadowed a field medic for the Venetian army. And all of this falls in line with his frequently quoted line of writing, "A doctor must be a traveler. Knowledge is experience."

• 24:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  During these years, he wrote about a treatment for syphilis, as well as his theory on the origin of syphilis. We know what causes syphilis today, but its exact origins on earth are still not known. He believed that this had originated as a result of sexual intercourse between a sex worker who had gonorrhea and a person with leprosy. This belief in the origin of syphilis probably explains his proposal to treat syphilis with mercury, which was also being used to treat leprosy. Paracelsus wrote about this treatment in 1530, and it was used for centuries.

• 24:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is probably because it did appear in some cases to eliminate the disease, but modern medical experts and historians suspect that this was actually the result of observing syphilis going into a dormant period, which is something that it naturally does. And there were certainly patients who died. Their deaths were chalked up to the disease, but it's just as likely that they died of mercury poisoning.

• 25:08Holly Frey?

  In his traveling years, Paracelsus also wrote what would become probably his most well-known work. This was Der Großen Wunden. It's a great surgery book. I probably butchered that German. That was published in 1536. And this was based on his time working with military units and treating wounds, as well as observing how soldiers managed their own care.

• 25:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then we get to his writings on hermetic chemistry. Hermeticism references the writings of a man the Greeks called Hermes Trismegistos, the Egyptian god Thoth. Those writings examine astrology, the occult, theology, and philosophy. And there's a whole section of Paracelsus's hermetic chemistry writings called Concerning the Signature of Natural Things.

• 25:58Holly Frey?

  So this writing is not only about medicine. It talks about what the signature of things is. Paracelsus explained that in his view, there are only three signaturs: man, Archos, and the stars. And Archos is a term that he used to describe the vital principle that's responsible for the growth and continuation of all living things. So in a very boiled down sense, that's what he's calling the natural world. And there's a lot of talk in this writing about the ways that people can choose to signify themselves, i.e. how they present publicly through dress and presentation. And all of this really is him setting up this idea that you can tell a lot about a

• 26:41Holly Frey?

  person or a thing by simply looking at it. This is a problem. As an example, quote, "Black eyes not only denote a healthy constitution, but also, for the most part, a constant mind free from doubt and fear, healthy and hearty, truthful and loving virtue. Gray eyes are the sign of a crafty man, ambiguous and inconsistent. Weak eyes denote good counsels, clever and profound deliberations, and so on. Bright eyes, which turn up, down, and to both sides, denote a false clever man who cannot be deceived, faithless, shirking work, desirous of ease, seeking to gain his livelihood in laziness by gambling, usury, impurity, theft, and the like."

• 27:25Holly Frey?

  Obviously, this is nonsensical.

• 27:29Holly Frey?

  And there are many other ways in which Paracelsus believed that a person's appearance could tell you about their personality and behavior.

• 27:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  He also wrote at length about kyromancy, or palm reading, as though it were a hard science, and the planets and the metals that they were associated with, and even necromancy. And then he gets to the curatives. One, for example, is a tincture made from urine. And there's a full recipe, quote, "Take old urine poured away from its deposit, several cups of it, in which dissolve three handfuls of ground salt. When you have strained it, boil it, and skim it carefully. In this again dissolve a handful of bruised vitriol," that's sulfuric acid, "with two or three ounces of bruised salt ammoniac."

• 28:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then carefully skim again with this liquid imbibe some filings and boil it until it can be pulverized. The dust thus produced reverberate over a powerful fire continually stirring it with an iron rod until it changes from its own color to another. And at last to the hues of most brilliant violet. From this, you can easily with spirits of wine or distilled acetum draw off the tincture. And when it is extracted by separation of the elements, you will collect what remains at the bottom of the glass, by means whereof, you will be able to produce wondrous effects, both within and without the body.

• 28:59Holly Frey?

  Throughout his various writings on what he calls signatures, Paracelsus explains that the earth purposely makes plants resemble other things so that humans can see the correct plant to treat their illnesses, but that they don't even necessarily need to see those things because our intuition already knows this truth without consciously seeing the signature. He wrote, quote, "The soul does not perceive the external or internal physical construction of herbs and roots, but it intuitively perceives at once their signatum." His idea gleaned from speaking with everyday people and which was expounded upon by scientists that followed was that if, like if you find a plant with a kidney shaped leaf, that it

• 29:43Holly Frey?

  would be useful in treating ailments of the kidneys.

• 29:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  We should note, though, that this line of treatment, as outlined by Paracelsus, is often a bit more indirect than simply consuming a plant that you see because he loved his lab work. Sometimes he worked things into a tincture, such as that long process with urine that we just described. He treated plague in a similar way, using minute amounts of the patient's excrement and preparing a medicine for them. Allegedly, he cured a number of people this way.

• 30:17Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I would like to see the notes on that. Paracelsus's end is actually a little bit of a mystery. We know that he died in Salzburg, Germany on September 24th, 1541, at the age of 48. But exactly how that happened has been relayed inconsistently in various accounts through the years. However, it happened, it does appear that it was relatively sudden. So in one account, he is said to have died in the kitchen of an inn that he was staying at. Sometimes references that he was sitting on a bench near the stove and just passed away. Another also mentions the inn, which is the White Horse Inn, and that account says he died in his bed there

• 30:59Holly Frey?

  after a sudden illness that came on that he had for a few days. And then there is another version that can kind of build on these two scenarios suggesting that the suddenness of his death or illness was because he had perhaps been poisoned by an assassin hired by a fellow physician or group of physicians who did not like Paracelsus's shakeup of their profession.

• 31:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will talk about the doctrine of signatures after Paracelsus in just a moment. But first, we'll hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

• 31:35Holly Frey?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 32:20Holly Frey?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped. And they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 33:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certifications, or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed

• 34:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  to help solve hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 34:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.

• 35:16Holly Frey?

  Paracelsus's death was hardly the end of his work. His writings on signatures had a life of their own. And also, he did not call it the doctrine of signatures. It picked up that name several decades later when other people were writing about it. But the other thing is, he had written additional texts that got published posthumously. And his combination of science and the occult has remained alluring for a great many readers in the century since he died. Even people today. I find them alluring because they're interesting, but I don't think they're science. Keep in mind, too, that this time of Paracelsus's life was really a big moment in human history, particularly in Europe.

• 36:00Holly Frey?

  So at the same time that Theophrastus slash Paracelsus was exploring the world of knowledge, the earliest voyages of Spain to North America were underway and the beginning of colonization by Europeans. Da Vinci was painting his masterpieces. Michelangelo was just starting his career. And Martin Luther was about to start a big uproar in challenging the Catholic Church. Paracelsus was sometimes called the Luther of doctors, and he hated it because he was like, everybody hates him and wants to kill him. Please don't say that about me. So it is important, as we talk about this, to contextualize the work of Paracelsus in a world that was undergoing a lot of other massive changes.

• 36:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  We know that he was not the only person who believed in this idea of the doctrine of signatures. But as we mentioned earlier, the origin of this concept is unknown. There are a number of ideas. Related to Paracelsus's use of the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, there's one school of thought that the doctrine of signatures originated in Egypt. There's also a theory that China is really where these concepts began and that as trade routes were established with Europe in the Middle Ages, these ideas spread quickly. There's a whole other approach that takes the position that we as humans just want to apply some sort of pattern recognition to the world around us in order to understand

• 37:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  it regardless of where we come from geographically or culturally.

• 37:33Holly Frey?

  We're going to talk about that reference to Chinese origins again in just a minute. But in the West, all of this kind of got rolled up under a religious ideology suggesting that of course, God created all of these clues in the way things in the natural world were shaped to lead us to the right treatments. But there are of course, problems inherent in that. For one, it hinges on the idea that everyone believes in the same God, doesn't account for religions where there would be multiple gods who's responsible for making plants shaped like organs. For another, it also puts humankind at the center of everything in the universe as though all of these things were created just for us.

• 38:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Putting all of that aside, what if two physicians were to disagree on what signature a plant had? That was part of the early criticism of the doctrine of signatures, which started really almost as soon as Paracelsus had started writing his long explanations of it. Flemish physician and botanist, Renbert de Doyen, sometimes called the father of botany, wrote of the doctrine just a couple of decades after Paracelsus's passing, saying, quote, "It is so changeable and uncertain that it seems absolutely unworthy of acceptance." Others followed suit over the years, including the father of homeopathy, Samuel Honeman.

• 38:55Holly Frey?

  The doctrine of signatures persisted, though, as a guiding tool for medicine for a long time. This excerpt is from the British Medical Journal in 1873, and it denounces it as backward, but the ongoing fascination with it is apparent. Quote, "According to M. Goobler's recent report to the Academy of Medicine in Paris on the Chinese materia medica, the belief in the specific action of drugs seems to have strongly influenced medical practice in China as it did but lately that of Europe. Besides, the Chinese believe, as the Europeans did in the Middle Ages, that the appearance of a substance will give a clue to the services it may render to man, i.e. the doctrine of signatures.

• 39:37Holly Frey?

  Thus, the luciole is recommended for affections of the visual organs. A matter having a red root is given for a menoria. Polygonum tinctorium, which yields indigo, is reputed efficacious for eruptive fevers. The reniform fruit of the cadsura chenensis is said to possess aphrodisiac properties, while ginseng, with its bifurcated root resembling the legs of a man, is looked upon as restoring virile powers to the sick and aged. Considerations of the same kind are doubtless the foundations of the reputation of the cordyceps chenensis as exciting the genital organs, that of the bardons parva flora as infallible in making the nails grow.

• 40:18Holly Frey?

  These are strange allusions, but they merit indulgence from those whose ancestors administered the lung wart to cure thesis, the gromwell to cure the gravel, and the carrot for the jaundice."

• 40:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  As more rigorous methods of testing substances and recording treatment efficacy evolved, the doctrine of signatures fell out of favor because so many of the claims that had been made by its followers were really proven false. For the most part, the doctrine of signatures is seen today as misguided or backwards thinking, even if it was cutting-edge science of the 16th century. But then there are instances where some of the associations made through it have turned out to actually be useful.

• 41:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  Is there a way to reconcile that?

• 41:06Holly Frey?

  Some people think so. In a 2007 article in Economic Botany, Bradley Bennett suggests a possible reinterpretation of the doctrine of signatures, writing, quote, "In traditional cultures, plant knowledge is effectively passed from one generation to the next through observation and oral tradition. The doctrine of signatures should be reevaluated with respect to, one, its role in the discovery of medicinal plants, two, post hoc attribution of signatures, three, the nature of signatures, and four, its role as a mnemonic." So this idea is that a plant that was found to have a medicinal benefit then could have the association of characteristics related to the illness

• 41:50Holly Frey?

  it was treating, applied to the plant retroactively to sort of help people remember, oh, that's the plant that helps me with this thing. Bennett continues later in that write-up, quote, "A signature like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In 1628, Guy de la Brasse noted that it was easy to imagine any resemblance between a plant and an animal that happened to be convenient." Bennett also notes later in that same paper that, quote, "Seeing a particular signature often requires a vivid imagination."

• 42:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  As a postscript, we really haven't included a lot in the way of examples in this episode of plants that look like a human organ and then people might use it to treat an illness related to that organ. That's on purpose, because there are still people who want to apply this method. When I was in massage school, I had an herbal medicine teacher who brought it up repeatedly. We're just not going to feed into that.

• 42:51Holly Frey?

  Yeah. I also, in an age when things get scrubbed and reported to people as though it's real through AI out of context, we're not going to offer anything that might help that.

• 43:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Right.

• 43:02Holly Frey?

  Because I don't want anybody to get hurt. So that is the doctrine of signatures and parasellesis.

• 43:11Holly Frey?

  For today, I have sewing email, which makes Oh, great. ... in my heart. This email is from Sarah and it makes me so happy. And it involves one of the cutest dogs in the world. Sarah writes, I am in my 70s. I started sewing when I was probably 11. Sewed lots of clothes for myself as a teenager, including a pantsuit alongside my best friend sewing hers. We wore them to see the monkeys at the Hollywood Bowl, just in case we might meet them. I sewed my wedding dress and lots of clothes for my kids. I loved the folkware patterns at that time. That was a brand, by the way. When my creative daughter showed interest in sewing, she eschewed patterns. She created all kinds of interesting things, including complex wallets and purses, just

• 43:55Holly Frey?

  making them up for herself. So, fast forward to the present. I was so excited to hear your shows on sewing patterns. They were fascinating. And then, a couple of days later, my daughter, her wife and I started watching The Great British Sewing Bee. And guess what they talked about in the first episode? Sewing pattern history. I was yelping with delight repeatedly while watching the segment. So fun when worlds collide like that and make sparkles. Thank you for a fascinating topic, well-covered. This is Luna, our rescue from Taiwan dog. She is a Taiwanese mountain dog cross and the sweetest dog ever. She adores her family and worries until we all, six of us in the house, are back home. This dog is so cute.

• 44:35Holly Frey?

  It's a sweet little black pup and she has white sprinkles on her paws and, oh, she's really, really cute. And she's hugging a lambie and it's really adorable. And then there's a bonus kitty. This is Mercury, one of our three Humane Society kitties. He is pretty wild and so much fun. He's also beautiful. This also worked out because Mercury came up in the episode and I'm going to talk about it in behind the scenes on Friday. Okay. We are so thankful, Sarah, for you sharing this. I'm glad you liked the sewing patterns episode. I always worry when it's very much in my super Nietzsche interests. And it might not be for everyone, but I'm glad it's for some people. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to

• 45:20Holly Frey?

  your favorite shows.

• 45:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 45:40Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else, isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working

• 46:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today.

• 47:19Speaker 07

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of the Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.