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Paracelsus, thus armed with opium, mercury, and antimony, remedies of no trifling importance, travelled in all directions and performed many extraordinary cures, amongst which was that of the famous printer Frobenius of Basil, a circumstance which immediately brought him acquainted with Erasmus,^[106] and made him known to the magistracy of Basil, who elected him professor of chemistry in the year 1527, which was the first professorship that was established in Europe for the promotion and dissemination of chemical science. But notwithstanding this testimony of his success, if we may credit Libavius, he often, like our modern quacks, left his patients more diseased than he found them; and it is acknowledged by his own disciple Oporinus, that when he was sent for to any town, for the purpose of administering his remedies, he was rarely suffered to protract his visit, on account of the general resentment of the inhabitants.

While seated in his chair, he burnt with great solemnity the writings of Galen and Avicenna, and declared to his audience that if God would not impart the secrets of physic, it was not only allowable but even justifiable to consult the devil. His cotemporary physicians he treated with the most sottish vanity and illiberal insolence; in the preface to his work entitled “Paragranum,” he tells them “that the very down of his bald pate had more knowledge than all their writers, the buckles of his shoes more learning than Galen and Avicenna, and his beard more experience than all their Universities.” With such a temper it could not be supposed that he would long retain his chair, in fact he quitted it in consequence of a quarrel with the magistrates, after which he continued to ramble about the country, generally intoxicated, and seldom changing his clothes, or even going to bed; and although he boasted of possessing a Panacea which was capable of curing all diseases in an instant, and even of prolonging life to an indefinite length, yet this drunkard and prince of empirics died after a few hours illness, in the forty-eighth year of his age, at Salzburg in Bavaria, with a bottle of his immortal Catholicon in his pocket.