The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France.

This book is a welcome addition to Allen Debus' studies of the Paracelsian tradition in early modern Europe. In his many articles and books, Debus has argued that the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be reduced simply to the terms of the debate within physics and astronomy. Medicine also witnessed a transformation, one that ultimately resulted in the repudiation of the Galenic system. The framework of the debate in medicine, Debus has shown, was set by the "chemical philosophy" stemming from the works of the Swiss-German medical reformer Paracelsus. In this important book, Debus extends his research on the Paracelsian tradition to France.

The chemical debate in early modern France was fought at two levels. At first, the issue was the legitimacy and efficacy of the use of chemical drugs. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the debate shifted to the question of chemistry as a rival natural philosophy. The first notices of Paracelsus in France occurred in the 1560s concerning the dispute over the use of antimony as a drug, which ended with a decree of the Parlement of Paris banning the internal use of antimony, a temporary victory for the Galenists. But the real issue of the antimony war (and of the debate over the use of chemical drugs in general) was not whether antimony was an effective drug or a dangerous poison, nor even whether Galen or Paracelsus had described the most appropriate therapeutical methodology. The real issue was whether or not the Medical Faculty of Paris, the guardian alike of orthodoxy and monopoly, would be able to make good on its claim to monopoly power over the licensing of medical practitioners throughout the realm. The debate grew particularly acrimonious when it became clear that many Paracelsians were also Protestants, and when Montpellier, Paris's chief rival, emerged as a center of both heresies.

Debus devotes two chapters to the debate over chemistry as a rival natural philosophy, a subject he follows into the Enlightenment. For many natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, Paracelsus' chemical world view was unacceptable because of its mystical component. Distancing himself from the more mystical Paracelsians, Jean Baptiste van Helmont attempted (with limited success) to reform chemistry in order to make it more acceptable to the new philosophers. Yet van Helmont's vitalism met with a cool reception among the new philosophers, who were committed to mechanistic explanations of organic phenomena. While physicians and natural philosophers of the late seventeenth century offered little opposition to the use of chemical drugs, they categorically rejected the chemical physiology and cosmology of the neo-Paracelsians. In the eighteenth century, the chemical philosophy flourished "beyond the establishment" in a host of minor works on transmutation, palingenesis, and other "miracles of nature," but within mainstream science and medicine the Paracelso-Helmontians were a decided minority. Yet interest in the chemical philosophy continued down to the end of the Enlightenment. As Debus points out in his postscript, the phlogiston theory had deep roots in Paracelsianism. The chemical philosophy appealed to Enlightenment natural philosophers because it offered an alternative to the rigorous mechanism of prevailing physiological thinking.

As a work of intellectual history, this book is successful. Debus agilely traces the complex development of French Paracelsianism, showing its relation to humanist medicine, to Protestantism, and to the new philosophy. Missing from the work is a cultural and sociological perspective that one hopes will soon be supplied by those following the trail blazed by this pioneering work.

NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY