The Figures

Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim)

Paracelsus (Philipp Theophrast Bombast von Hohenheim, known as Theophrastus von Hohenheim or Paracelsus; near Einsiedeln, in present-day Switzerland, 1493/94 - Salzburg, 1541) was a German-speaking physician and surgeon who taught in Basel, wrote on medicine, natural philosophy and theology, and used alchemy to prepare medicines (Urs Leo Gantenbein, HLS). He is also an extreme case of false attribution. After his death many texts he did not write circulated under his name (an “extensive pseudepigraphic literature”, in the words of the HLS), and from them come the homunculus recipe, the “Apocalypse of Hermes” and the image of the alchemist who made gold. This profile separates three layers: what is documented, what is debated and what was attributed to him later.

Who was Paracelsus? The documented facts

Paracelsus was an itinerant physician, born near Einsiedeln in 1493 or 1494, who taught in Basel in 1527-1528 and died in Salzburg in 1541. The most reliable short biography is the one in the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), written by Urs Leo Gantenbein, founder and director of the Paracelsus project at the University of Zurich (Zurich Paracelsus Project). According to that article, he was the son of the physician Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim; around 1502 the family moved to Villach, in Carinthia, where his father practised medicine, and his early education came from his father and from clerics. In 1524-1525 he set up as a physician in Salzburg, and had to leave after taking part in social unrest; in 1526 he became a citizen of Strasbourg, and in 1527 he came to Basel as city physician and professor of medicine. There he lectured mostly in German rather than Latin and announced a far-reaching reform of medicine. His difficult temperament soon led to a break, and in 1528 he had to flee Basel (HLS).

From then on he never managed to settle permanently in any city. He passed through Colmar and then Nuremberg, where he published two works on syphilis before the city banned him from printing. In 1531 he treated the burgomaster Christian Studer in St. Gallen and lived for half a year in his house; in 1534 he travelled through the Tyrol; in 1535 he described the spa of Pfäfers; in 1536 he published the Grosse Wundartzney (“Great Surgery”) in Augsburg. After stays in Linz, Moravia, Pressburg (Bratislava), Vienna and Carinthia, he died in Salzburg on 24 September 1541 (HLS). The sources we used do not say what he died of, and they give no support to the stories that he was murdered by robbers or poisoned by his enemies.

His university education is the first point in dispute. The HLS states that around 1515 he took a doctorate in medicine and surgery at Ferrara. The IHCD profile at the Universitat de València is more cautious: he seems to have studied at Ferrara, but “it is not clear that he ever attained the degree of doctor”, although he did take some of the intermediate degrees of the day (Universitat de València, IHCD; our translation). We have not found a university document that settles the question, so we give both versions.

He was also a theologian. His theological writings are for the most part biblical commentaries, above all on the Psalms and the Gospels, with a critique of the institutional Church. According to the HLS, he left the largest body of specialist writing in early modern German of any author after Luther. His thought is shaped by Neoplatonic natural philosophy and by magic, and in it personal experience counts for more than book learning (HLS).

What did Paracelsus publish in his lifetime, and what was printed later?

Paracelsus published very little in his lifetime, and almost everything else was printed after his death; no other fact changes the picture of him as much. What he saw in print were annual astrological prognostications, the two Nuremberg treatises on syphilis (1529 and 1530), the short work on the baths of Pfäfers (1535) and the Grosse Wundartzney (1536), which the HLS calls “the only major treatise” he saw in print. The Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova of the Theatrum Paracelsicum, which updates Karl Sudhoff’s bibliography (1894) with the records of VD16 and USTC, lists 34 printings from 1529 to 1538, most of them prognostications (consulted on 29 October 2026; Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova).

The rest remained in manuscript. Reception, says the HLS, began “only after 1560” and culminated in Johannes Huser’s edition of the medical and natural-philosophical writings (Basel, 1589-1591) and of the surgical writings (Strasbourg, 1605); the theological writings had to wait until the twentieth century, and even then were edited only in part (HLS). The Valencia profile sums it up: most of his work “was published after his death” (Universitat de València, IHCD). Among the first posthumous printings are the Latin De vita longa (1560, edited by Adam von Bodenstein), the Drey Bücher dedicated to the estates of Carinthia, with the Septem Defensiones (Cologne, 1564), the Paragranum (Frankfurt, 1565) and the Astronomia magna (Frankfurt, 1571) (Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova).

That chronology matters for a practical reason: the manuscripts of Paracelsus passed through the hands of editors, physicians and alchemists for twenty or thirty years before they reached the press, and in that time they were mixed with other people’s texts. What circulates today as “the works of Paracelsus” is, in large part, what those editors printed under his name.

Was Paracelsus an alchemist? Arcana, not gold

Paracelsus was an alchemist, but in a precise sense: he used alchemy to make medicines, not gold. According to the HLS, he used alchemical concepts both to prepare remedies and to explain processes in the body, and against the doctrine of the four humours he supplemented the four elements with the tria prima: sulphur, mercury and salt as active philosophical principles (HLS). In the Paragranum, written in 1530 and one of his securely authentic texts, alchemy is one of the pillars of medicine, and its aim is stated plainly:

nicht als die sagen, alchimia mache gold, mache silber; hie ist das fürnemen: mach arcana und richte dieselbigen gegen den krankheiten

“Not, as they say, that alchemy makes gold, makes silver; here the purpose is: make arcana and direct them against the diseases.”

(Paragranum, book III, “Alchimia”, in Sudhoff, Sämtliche Werke, I. Abt., vol. 8, 1924, p. 185; text transcribed from the scan of the volume; our translation.) In the same passage he calls the stomach “the alchemist” of the body and alchemy “the outer stomach”. The Germanist Joachim Telle summed it up in 1991: Paracelsus took leave of the traditional alchemy of transmutation and turned it into pharmacy (Telle, “Johann Huser in seinen Briefen”, in Parerga Paracelsica, 1991, p. 220, cited in Theatrum Paracelsicum, biography of Paracelsus).

Here it pays not to go further than the sources do. In that passage Paracelsus does not say that the transmutation of metals is impossible, and the attributed collection De natura rerum contains a book on the transmutations of natural things (book VII, De transmutationibus rerum naturalium, in Sudhoff I/11), and Gantenbein sees no strong arguments against its authenticity (Theatrum Paracelsicum, De natura rerum). What can be said is this: in his secure texts, the aim of alchemy is medicine, not gold. The line “he sought the philosopher’s stone to turn lead into gold”, repeated so often in popular writing, describes the Paracelsus of legend, not the Paracelsus of the Paragranum. For the wider frame of the alchemical Work, see The Great Work.

One word tied to his name is “spagyric” (in the text, kunst spagirica), the art of separating and recombining. It appears, for example, in the homunculus passage of De natura rerum, book I (Sudhoff I/11, p. 317), that is, in a text whose authenticity is rejected (see below). If you are looking for the spagyric art “of Paracelsus”, first check which work each quotation comes from.

Which works are by Paracelsus, and which were attributed to him?

The treatises on syphilis, the Grosse Wundartzney, the Paragranum and the Septem Defensiones are authentic; De natura rerum is a mixture; De tinctura physicorum, the Apocalypsis Hermetis and the Arbatel are fakes. Research on “pseudo-Paracelsus” has advanced a great deal in recent years; a good way in is the collective volume edited by Didier Kahn and Hiro Hirai, Pseudo-Paracelsus: Forgery and Early Modern Alchemy, Medicine and Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2022, DOI 10.1163/9789004503380). The table gathers the works most often cited under his name. For doubtful or fake texts we give the verdict of the Theatrum Paracelsicum, which devotes an entry to the history of each text; for the authentic ones, what the HLS and Sudhoff’s edition say. Printing data come from the Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova. Where we have not checked a digital copy or its licence, we say so.

Gantenbein’s verdicts come from his article “Real or Fake? New Light on the Paracelsian De natura rerum”, Ambix 67 (2020), pp. 4-29 (DOI 10.1080/00026980.2020.1720339), and we quote them as the Theatrum Paracelsicum transcribes them. On De tinctura physicorum, the entry records the view of Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle: the treatise “contributed significantly to the early modern legend of the successful alchemist Paracelsus” (Theatrum Paracelsicum).

Did Paracelsus write the homunculus recipe?

According to current research, no. The recipe is in book I of De natura rerum, “on the generation of natural things” (Sudhoff I/11, pp. 316-317; Huser, vol. 6). The text asks whether it is possible, by art and by nature, for a human being to be born outside a woman’s body, and answers that it is: a man’s sperm is sealed in a cucurbit and left to putrefy for forty days in venter equinus, the steady heat of horse dung, until it moves and looks like a human being, though transparent and without a body; it is then fed for forty weeks on the “arcanum of human blood”, and the result is a complete child, only much smaller. “Dasselbig wir ein homunculum nennen”, “this we call a homunculus” (p. 317; text transcribed from the scan; our translation). The text presents it as one of the greatest secrets God has let mortals know, and adds that giants and dwarfs come from such homunculi.

Three facts change the usual reading. First, the date: the “1537” repeated on many pages is the date of the dedicatory letter, not of a printing; books I-VII were first printed in 1572, thirty-one years after the death of Paracelsus, and the oldest manuscript, the Freiberg one, dates from 1571. Second, the authorship: Sudhoff considered the whole work spurious, perhaps reworked from authentic fragments, and Gantenbein calls the preface and books I and II, precisely the part with the homunculus, “rather crude forgeries”. Third, the period: according to the same entry, the non-authentic parts were probably written in the 1560s (Theatrum Paracelsicum, De natura rerum). The homunculus recipe is therefore a pseudo-Paracelsian text, probably from the 1560s, not a page of his.

There is also another “homunculus” in the corpus: the one in the Liber de imaginibus, a work of disputed authenticity, which Akihito Murase studied in the same issue of Ambix (“The Homunculus and the Paracelsian Liber de imaginibus”, pp. 47-61, DOI 10.1080/00026980.2020.1720359). And neither should be confused with the “homunculus” of neurology, the map of the body in the cerebral cortex, which shares only the name. What came before and after the recipe, from the Arabic Liber vaccae to Wagner’s flask in Goethe’s Faust, is told in The alchemical homunculus.

Did Paracelsus say “the dose makes the poison”?

Paracelsus said it in substance, but not in the form in which it is usually quoted. His best-known sentence is in the third of the Septem Defensiones, the seven defences against his critics, and it is in German:

was ist das nit gift ist? alle ding sind gift und nichts on gift; alein die dosis macht das ein ding kein gift ist.

“What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dose alone makes a thing not a poison.”

(Sudhoff, I. Abt., vol. 11, 1928, p. 138; text transcribed from the scan; our translation.) The context is a defence of his prescriptions: his critics accused him of using poisons, and he replies that the physicians’ theriac also contains snake venom, and that any food or drink taken beyond its dose is poison. The Defensiones were written in 1538 and printed after his death, in Cologne, in 1564; a Latin translation appeared in 1566 (Jeffrey K. Aronson, The BMJ Opinion, 9 August 2019; printer and year in the Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova).

The Latin formula “sola dosis facit venenum” (“the dose alone makes the poison”) is not in that passage, and we have not found it in any of his texts that we consulted. The Latin also says something different: Paracelsus does not claim that the dose turns something into a poison, but that the dose is what makes a thing not a poison. The Cologne edition of 1564 already carried Latin glosses in the margin, such as “Omnis purgatio venenum, si non servetur dosis” (“every purgative is a poison if the dose is not heeded”, in Aronson’s translation), but not even these are the famous formula. If you quote it, the honest course is to give the German and the reference, and to present the Latin as a later summary, not as his words. This sentence is why he is often presented as the “father of toxicology”; to understand what he actually wrote, it is enough to read the whole passage.

What did Paracelsus say about Hermes, and how did he become “Hermes Secundus”?

Paracelsus treated Hermes as one alchemical authority among many, criticising him in one passage and agreeing with him in another; the title “Hermes Secundus” was given to him by others after his death. His fame in the history of Hermeticism comes from what others did with him, not from what he said about Hermes. In the Paragranum Hermes appears among the authors of a theory that Paracelsus rejects, that metals are born of mercury and sulphur: for him, all minerals consist of three principles, not two, and those who taught otherwise spoke from fantasy and not from the “light of nature”. As he puts it:

dan Albertus hat dise ler nit vom h. geist gehabt, sonder nur aus vergebner speculation. also auch Thomas und ander, Hermes und Archelaus.

“For Albertus did not have this teaching from the Holy Spirit, but only from vain speculation. And so too Thomas and others, Hermes and Archelaus.”

(Paragranum, book I, in Sudhoff, I. Abt., vol. 8, 1924, p. 148; text transcribed from the scan; our translation.) Here Hermes is one more alchemical authority, cited alongside Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and criticised with them. In another passage of the same book Paracelsus agrees with him on a specific point: “was setzt Hermes und Archelaus von vitriolo? groß tugent, und es ist war” (“What do Hermes and Archelaus hold of vitriol? Great virtue, and it is true”; Sudhoff, I. Abt., vol. 8, p. 190; our translation), though he reproaches physicians for not knowing how to draw that virtue out. In the texts we have reviewed Hermes does not appear as a master or as a source of revelation, and we have found no evidence that Paracelsus read the Corpus Hermeticum, which circulated in Latin from the translation by Marsilio Ficino; nor can we say that he did not read it.

The image of the Hermetic Paracelsus was built after 1560, in several documented steps:

1560, Bodenstein. In the dedication to the Doge and government of Venice in his edition of De vita longa, signed in Basel at the beginning of 1560 (the text is dated “quarto Kal. Februar.”, that is, 29 January; the Theatrum Paracelsicum catalogues it under 1 February), the editor Adam von Bodenstein writes that the ancients cultivated above all divine philosophy, “quod liquet in Cabala, in Mercurio trismegisto, Beroso, Orpheo, Pythagora, Platone” (“as is plain in the Cabala, in Mercurius Trismegistus, in Berosus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato”; our translation) (text in the Theatrum Paracelsicum; edition by W. Kühlmann and J. Telle, Corpus Paracelsisticum 1, no. 6). This is the genealogy of the prisca theologia, invoked by one of his first editors in a book by Paracelsus himself.

1566 and 1603, the Apocalypsis Hermetis. An anonymous Latin text reworking John of Rupescissa was printed in London in 1566 “incerto Authore”; only the German version was attributed to Paracelsus, and its 1603 edition is the first to call him “Hermes Secundus”, the second Hermes (Theatrum Paracelsicum).

1570 and 1575, De tinctura physicorum and the Arbatel. The first, printed in 1570, contributed significantly, according to Kühlmann and Telle, to the legend of Paracelsus as a successful alchemist (Theatrum Paracelsicum). The second, a manual of magic printed in Basel in 1575 without an author’s name, the work of an anonymous Paracelsian, places Paracelsus beside Hermes Trismegistus as “secretorum pater”, father of secrets, in aphorism 26 (Theatrum Paracelsicum).

Around 1594, Croll. In a poem printed in B. G. Penot’s Tractatus varii (Frankfurt, 1594, p. 160), the physician Oswald Croll presents Paracelsus as the culmination of a chain of alchemists that begins with Hermes Trismegistus and his Emerald Tablet and continues with Geber, Artephius, Roger Bacon, Ramon Llull, Arnau de Vilanova, Bernard of Treviso and George Ripley, among others (W. Kühlmann and J. Telle, eds., Oswaldus Crollius, Alchemomedizinische Briefe 1585 bis 1597, Stuttgart, 1998, pp. 201-202, cited in Theatrum Paracelsicum). In that chain, Llull and Arnau also appear on the strength of alchemical works they did not write.

1614, the Fama. The first of the Rosicrucian manifestos names among the moderns “Theophrastus”, who “did not enter our Fraternity, but diligently read the Book M” (p. 101 of the Dresden copy, image 105; our translation).

1625, the Musaeum Hermeticum. In the Frankfurt alchemical anthology edited by Lucas Jennis, the portrait of Paracelsus appears on the engraved title pages of two treatises, one of them by Balthasar Schwan (Bibliographia Paracelsica, BP.Alchemica.1625-03; see Musaeum Hermeticum).

Telle described the result in 1991: among the alchemists who sought gold, and thanks to the steady multiplication of pseudo-Paracelsian and Paracelsist writings, Paracelsus ended up dressed in the legendary tinsel of a “German Hermes Trismegistus” (paraphrase of Telle, 1991, p. 220, in Theatrum Paracelsicum). The HLS says the same in other words: soon after his death an abundant legend grew up around the supposed gold-maker and magician, accompanied by an extensive body of pseudepigraphic writings (HLS).

The clearest case is the Emerald Tablet: it is often said that Paracelsus translated it or wrote a commentary on it. The Theatrum Paracelsicum records this Commentary on the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus as a work that was never printed and of which no manuscript survives; the report may refer to a lost manuscript in the library of Erich Pfeffer, or to a German version of the Tablet with a short commentary, included in a treatise by Caspar Hartung that the 1603 edition wrongly attributed to Paracelsus (Theatrum Paracelsicum). For the text of the Tablet and its versions, see The Emerald Tablet, clause by clause.

Which Paracelsus myths are false, and where do they come from?

Traced to their sources, the common claims about Paracelsus turn out to be later inventions, misquotations or open questions. The homunculus. The recipe is in a book printed in 1572 whose authenticity is rejected; according to current research it is not by Paracelsus. “Sola dosis facit venenum”. His sentence is in German and says that the dose makes something not a poison; the Latin is not his. The gold. In the Paragranum he denies that the aim of alchemy is to make gold or silver; the legend of the alchemist who succeeded was born of fake texts from the 1560s. The “Hermeticist”. In his secure texts Hermes is one more alchemical authority: in the Paragranum Paracelsus criticises him together with Albertus and Thomas (p. 148) and agrees with him on the virtues of vitriol (p. 190), but never treats him as a master; “German Hermes” and “Hermes Secundus” are titles that others gave him. The Emerald Tablet. No commentary of his survives. The violent death. The HLS gives only the place and the date, Salzburg, 24 September 1541; the versions about robbers or poisoners have no source in what we have consulted. The Ferrara doctorate. The HLS takes it as certain; the Universitat de València doubts it. The “complete works”. Sudhoff’s German edition fills fourteen volumes for the medical, scientific and philosophical work alone (1922-1933), and the theology is still being edited separately; a one-volume edition is necessarily a selection.

How can you read Paracelsus today?

To read Paracelsus in the original German, there are three editions to know: Huser’s, Sudhoff’s and, for the theology, the Neue Paracelsus-Edition. The edition by Johannes Huser (Basel, 1589-1591, with the surgery in Strasbourg, 1605) is the historical basis; its full text can be consulted in the THEO database of the Zurich Paracelsus Project, and Internet Archive has a 1616 reprint digitised by the Getty Research Institute (aureoliphilippit00para; the record states no licence). The modern reference edition is Karl Sudhoff’s Sämtliche Werke, I. Abteilung, fourteen volumes (1922-1933), although, according to the Zurich Paracelsus Project, most of these writings still lack an edition with a critical apparatus and commentary. Sudhoff’s edition has been digitised by the Wellcome Library with a warning that it may be in copyright (which is why we quote only short phrases of the sixteenth-century text here, transcribed and translated by us). The theology has been published since 2008 in the Neue Paracelsus-Edition (De Gruyter), edited by Gantenbein; its second volume, with the Salzburg writings of 1524-1525, appeared in 2025 (Zurich Paracelsus Project). To find out whether a work is his, the quickest check is the entry for that work in the Theatrum Paracelsicum.

Three layers, in order. The fact: an itinerant physician who taught mostly in German, published little in his lifetime and understood alchemy as pharmacy. The debate: which parts of the corpus are his, starting with De natura rerum, and whether he took a doctorate at Ferrara. The reception: the homunculus, the gold-making alchemist and the second Hermes, born of the editors, imitators and forgers who printed him after 1560. It is the same attribution problem that the alchemical treatises of Llull and Arnau raise on a different scale and that, on a far larger one, the writings that tradition placed under the name of Hermes raise too (Hermeticism and its neighbours). Before you quote a sentence “by Paracelsus”, find the work it comes from and give it the same test as any ancient attribution.

Key facts

Name	Philipp Theophrast Bombast von Hohenheim (baptismal name); Theophrastus von Hohenheim; Paracelsus
Dates	Near Einsiedeln (Switzerland), 1493/94 - Salzburg, 24 September 1541
Occupation	Physician and surgeon; city physician and professor in Basel (1527-1528); also an author of theology
Printed in his lifetime	Prognostications, two treatises on syphilis (Nuremberg, 1529-1530), the short work on Pfäfers (1535) and the Grosse Wundartzney (1536)
Reference editions	Huser, Basel, 1589-1591; Sudhoff, 14 volumes, 1922-1933; Neue Paracelsus-Edition (theology), since 2008
On alchemy	He used it to prepare medicines: “make arcana and direct them against the diseases”, not gold (Paragranum)
Homunculus	The recipe is in De natura rerum, book I: printed in 1572, authenticity rejected

Fair questions

Who was Paracelsus and what did he do?

A physician and surgeon born around 1493/94 near Einsiedeln who died in Salzburg in 1541. He was city physician and professor in Basel in 1527-1528, taught mostly in German, wanted to reform medicine and used alchemy to prepare medicines. He wrote a great deal on medicine, natural philosophy and theology, but almost all of it was published after his death.

Was Paracelsus an alchemist?

Yes, but not in the sense of the legend. In the Paragranum (1530) he writes that the aim of alchemy is not to make gold or silver but to prepare “arcana” against diseases. The image of the alchemist who made gold comes from fake texts written after his death, mostly in the 1560s.

Was Paracelsus the most important alchemist?

It depends on what you mean by alchemy. If you mean the transmutation of metals, no: he did not pursue it, and his fame as a gold alchemist comes from works he did not write. If you mean alchemy applied to medicines, the claim makes more sense: according to the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, that approach gave him a major influence on the development of physiology and pharmacy, and he also supplemented the four elements with his tria prima (sulphur, mercury and salt).

Did Paracelsus create a homunculus?

There is no evidence that he did. The homunculus recipe is in book I of De natura rerum, printed in 1572; Sudhoff considered the whole work spurious and Gantenbein (2020) calls books I and II forgeries. The date of 1537 often given is the date of the dedication, not of a printing.

Did Paracelsus say “the dose makes the poison”?

He said something similar, in German: “all things are poison and nothing is without poison; the dose alone makes a thing not a poison” (Septem Defensiones, III, written in 1538 and printed in Cologne in 1564). The Latin formula “sola dosis facit venenum” is not his.

Sources & further reading

• Urs Leo Gantenbein, “Paracelsus”, in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), 2006 version, revised 27 September 2010: hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/012196 (consulted on 29 October 2026; CC BY-SA licence).
• Universitat de València, IHCD, “Paracelso (1493-1541)” (in Spanish): uv.es/ihcd/Farmacologia/bioparacelso.html (consulted on 29 October 2026).
• Karl Sudhoff (ed.), Theophrast von Hohenheim gen. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, I. Abteilung, 14 volumes (1922-1933); vol. 8 (1924), Paragranum, pp. 133-221: Internet Archive, Wellcome Library copy; vol. 11 (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1928), Septem Defensiones, pp. 123-160, and De natura rerum, pp. 307-403: Internet Archive, Wellcome Library copy (records marked InC 1.0).
• Johannes Huser (ed.), Bücher und Schrifften (Basel, 1589-1591); Strasbourg reprint, 1616, Getty Research Institute copy: Internet Archive.
• Theatrum Paracelsicum, Bibliographia Paracelsica Nova: Books by Paracelsus 1527 to 1599: theatrum-paracelsicum.com (consulted on 29 October 2026).
• Theatrum Paracelsicum, entries on works: De natura rerum, Apocalypsis Hermetis, De tinctura physicorum, De magia veterum (Arbatel), Auslegung über Tabulam Smaragdinam Hermetis Trismegisti; biography of Paracelsus with the notes of J. Telle and W. Kühlmann: Biographies/Paracelsus (consulted on 29 October 2026).
• Adam von Bodenstein, dedication to the Doge and government of Venice, Basel, “quarto Kal. Februar.” [29 January] 1560, in Paracelsus, Libri quatuor de vita longa (1560); edition by J. Paulus in the Theatrum Paracelsicum: Latin text; W. Kühlmann and J. Telle (eds.), Corpus Paracelsisticum 1, no. 6.
• Urs Leo Gantenbein, “Real or Fake? New Light on the Paracelsian De natura rerum”, Ambix 67, no. 1 (2020), pp. 4-29, DOI 10.1080/00026980.2020.1720339.
• Akihito Murase, “The Homunculus and the Paracelsian Liber de imaginibus”, Ambix 67, no. 1 (2020), pp. 47-61, DOI 10.1080/00026980.2020.1720359.
• Didier Kahn and Hiro Hirai (eds.), Pseudo-Paracelsus: Forgery and Early Modern Alchemy, Medicine and Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2022), DOI 10.1163/9789004503380.
• Joachim Telle, “Johann Huser in seinen Briefen”, in Parerga Paracelsica (1991), p. 220.
• Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle (eds.), Oswaldus Crollius, Alchemomedizinische Briefe 1585 bis 1597 (Stuttgart, 1998), pp. 201-202.
• Jeffrey K. Aronson, “When I use a word... Nothing is not a poison”, The BMJ Opinion, 9 August 2019: blogs.bmj.com.
• Bibliographia Paracelsica, entry BP.Alchemica.1625-03 (Musaeum Hermeticum, Frankfurt, Lucas Jennis, 1625): Theatrum Paracelsicum.
• Zurich Paracelsus Project (Universität Zürich): paracelsus.uzh.ch, on the Neue Paracelsus-Edition (consulted on 29 October 2026).