This is from Jethro Kloss in Back to Eden.
In the year 1490 A.D., there was a physician in Germany, named William Bombast von Hohemhein. When his son was born he named him Theophratus von Hohemhein. The son was carefully taught in the same school as his father. He became dissatisfied with his father and teachers and went into the mines of Tyrol. There he saw minerals purified by the action of other minerals and he conceived the idea of purifying human bodies in the same manner. He began trying minerals on the bodies of his patients. We have no record of the result of his experiments, because there was none made. He called himself “Paracelsus”, for what reason we do not know, unless to designate that he was above the Celsus who lived centuries before him. His ideas were those of a chemist about the human body. He salivated his patients when they had “actions of the bowels”, and it seemed as though he knew what to do for them.
It is stated that he publicly burned the books of Galen and Hippocrates, and threw aside all their ideas and went in for chemically purifying the body by use of minerals. His own ideas were disastrous to him. He died in 1541, being only fifty of fifty-one years old. He did not live long, but he transformed the medical practice. After his death there were hundreds of people who took up his practice of giving minerals in place of herbs, roots, and barks.
As far as we can find in history, he was the first man who ever gave mercury, who made any profession of ‘medicine’. He gave it in large and small doses. Up to the present day this form of giving minerals has increased until the majority of doctors in the civilized world use minerals to purify the body. The herbalists in Great Britain are called botanic practitioners. They are really successors of Galen and Hippocrates, and the regular doctors of today are successors of the descendants of Hohemhein of the fifteenth century. From 460 B.C. to 1500 A.D., nineteen hundred years, we have no record of anyone giving minerals for the cure of diseases until Hohemhein… There was very little deviation from the beliefs and teachings of Hippocrates that in “nature there was strength” to cure disease.
… Hohemhein tried his mercurial compounds on his patients [syphilis] and in his works stated that it seemed to “drive out the humor”. That is the way that mercury came into general use in the treatment of syphilis.
It would not have hurt Freeman Bumstead’s reputation as teacher if he had told the exact truth and given the facts as they were, that mercury was the invention of an ignorant mind, that human bodies are not subject to chemical laws, like minerals, and could be purified by another mineral, which invention led the world into the deception of dosing the body with a poison to combat another poison, but in reality substituted one poison for another in the body. Mercury takes away absolutely nothing, but places a far worse condition in the system than there was before. The giving of quicksilver (or Quack Salber) resulted in the calling of physicians who dosed with quicksilver “quacks”.
Herbs were the first medicine used by man. Allopaths are about five hundred years old.
Jethro Kloss Back to Eden PP 47-50