Die Canones des Pseudo-Mesue: Eine mittelalterliche Purgantien-Lehre

different symposiums. The overall theme could be described as "for and against Paracelsus". Gundolf Keil is violently against Paracelsus whom he accuses of being misshapen, unoriginal, a bad physician and a bad surgeon. He is also against Karl Sudhoff for being too enthusiastic about his subject. Other contributions deal with Paracelsus's life, including his inglorious departure from Basel which now ironically is celebrating the 500th anniversary of his birth. An indirect influence of Ficino and Neoplatonism on Paracelsus is defended by some and attacked by others. Benzenhofer analyses a trilogy by Guido Kolbenheyer which makes Paracelsus into a truly German hero. But Benzenhofer is mistaken when he describes the National Socialist Kolbenheyer, who was born in Budapest and lived in Tubingen and Munich, as a Sudeten German. Vivian Nutton and Bernhard Dietrich Haage deal with the problem of how far Paracelsus was an innovator of medicine comparable to Luther in religion. Hartmut Rudolph deals with the theology of Paracelsus, specially with regard to his accepting the possibility of free will about which he changed his mind during his lifetime. Wolf-Dieter Muller-Jahncke shows the special way Paracelsus uses the idea of the parallelism of macrocosm and microcosm. Volker Zimmermann reports on Paracelsus in literature, and two contributions deal with his medical ethics. The discussions are more arresting than helpful, but footnotes, including those of Gundolf Keil on medieval medicine and surgery in such works as Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival stimulate one to further reading, and cover most of the Paracelsus scholarship of the 1990s.