1530 - Medicine

Medicine

Die Gross Wundartznei by Paracelsus describes the doctrine of "signatures" and other specious medical ideas but does establish sound principles that bodily functions are based on chemical processes and that different diseases demand different treatments (e.g., mercury is specified for the pox [syphilis]). Paracelsus is the name that Theophrastus von Hohenheim has adopted to equate himself with the Roman physician Celsus of 1500 years ago.

Syphilis, or the French Disease (Syphilidis sive Morbi Gallici) by Verona-born Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro, 47, gives a name to the disease first observed in 1495. The work is in the form of a rhyme about a shepherd named Syphilus who offended the god Apollo and was punished with the world's first case of the pox (Fracastoro is noted also as a poet, astronomer, and geologist).