Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time

Charles Webster was a historian of early modern science and medicine, and this book, published by Yale University Press, is an academic study of Paracelsus, the sixteenth century physician and alchemist, situating his medical theories within his apocalyptic religious worldview rather than treating the two as separate. Its strength is exactly that integration, showing that Paracelsus's unconventional medicine cannot be understood apart from his millenarian religious convictions, a connection earlier scholarship often underplayed. Webster draws on Paracelsus's own often difficult German and Latin writings directly. Its limit is that as a scholarly monograph aimed at readers with some background in the period, it assumes familiarity with early modern religious and medical history rather than introducing Paracelsus from a complete beginner's starting point.