"Philip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern; a name that is familiar but a man who has been hard to perceive or understand." "But who was Paracelsus and what did he really believe and practice? He has been seen both as a charlatan and as a founder of modern science, but Philip Ball's book reveals a more complex man - who used his eyes and ears to learn from nature how to heal, and who wrote influential books on medicine, surgery, alchemy and theology while living a drunken, combative, vagabond life. Above all Ball reveals a man who was a product of his time - an age of great change in which Christendom was divided, the classics were rediscovered and the earth was displaced from the centre of the cosmos - and whose bringing together of the seemingly diverse disciplines of alchemy and biology signalled the beginning of the age of rationalism."--Jacket