‘In Deutschland sehe ich eine neue Schule an Boden gewinnen, deren Urheber Theophrastus Paracelsusist’, Georg Joachim Rheticus an Joachim Camerariuss 1 Februar 1563

‘In Germany I see a new school of thought finding favour, and its source is Paracelsus’, Georg Joachim Rheticus to Joachim Camerariuss 1 February 1563

The second half of the sixteenth century brought some of Paracelsus's writing to print. More and more people had access to his works and interest in his approach to the body grew. One of his prominent followers, Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn (1531–c. 96) helped foster the paracelsian school of thought in his medical self-help book. He combined Paracelsus's teachings on human reproduction with other profitable methods of explaining the body, such as lift-a-flap anatomies and uroscopy charts. Thurneisser's work demonstrates how some of Paracelsus's ideas informed a way to think about male and female bodies in different ways, how the name Paracelsus began to be associated with a particular kind of medical practice, and how Paracelsus's understanding of human birth was popularized in the second half of the sixteenth century. This chapter explores the spread of paracelsian ideas about the body from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century in the works of Leonhard Thurneisser (1531–95/6) and alchemist/physician Chistoph von Hellwig (1663–1721). The works of Thurneisser and Hellwig demonstrate that Paracelsus's theory of conception and his understanding of the body as consisting of bipartite or tripartite qualities persisted. Their writing also suggests that followers in the field of medicine focused on his alchemically-based approach to the physical body and in this way his teachings had a lasting impact on the way people understood sexed bodies.

Thurneisser and Hellwig were popular medical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining their widely-sold works offers a new perspective on the influence of Paracelsus. For the most part, previous research tried to situate Paracelsus in academic medicine. By trying to find the legacy of Paracelsus in the academic realm, he was regarded as a failure because his approach to medicine was not integrated into university education.