Paracelsusthe WildfireENFP

On St John's Eve in June 1527, while the students of Basel kept their midsummer fire, their new lecturer in medicine threw in the textbook they had been taught to revere. He was about 33.

His name was Theophrastus von Hohenheim. The world knows him as Paracelsus. He never said which book it was. He called it the summa, the sum of all the books. By one account it was the great medical canon of Avicenna, the work every university doctor trained on.

He had come to Basel because of a cure. He treated the famous printer Johann Froben, Froben got better, and the city made Paracelsus its physician, with the right to lecture at the university. He arrived with one powerful friend and a head full of ideas the faculty did not share.

On 5 June 1527 he posted a notice of his lectures. It invited the students, and anyone else who cared to come. Then he taught in German as well as Latin, in a world where medicine lived in a language most patients could not speak.

That is the Wildfire instinct at its purest: find something precious kept behind a wall, and hand it to everyone. The doctor who explains a diagnosis in plain words is doing the same thing today.

Three weeks later came the fire. He later described it in one breathless line.

Read it as the cry it was. He believed the medicine of his day was making sick people suffer, and he wanted the suffering burned away. Wildfires get angriest when a value is crossed, and the anger is usually on someone else's behalf.

Basel's physicians and apothecaries saw an outsider who had insulted their teachers, their Latin and their living in one evening. A satire went round calling him Cacophrastus. Then, in the autumn, Froben died, and Paracelsus lost his only shield. In February 1528 he left the city in a hurry, about eight months after that first notice. He never held a public chair again.

He spent the rest of his life on the road, writing, arguing and treating whoever would have him. A portrait of 1538 carried his Latin motto: Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest. Let no one belong to another who can belong to himself.

In September 1541 he was in Salzburg. On the 21st, in a room at the White Horse inn on the Kaigasse, he dictated his will. He was about 47. He provided for relatives and friends, and left the rest to the city's poor.

He died three days later and was buried, as he had asked, in the paupers' cemetery of St Sebastian. The fire in Basel is the part people remember. The will is the part that reached the poor.