History
Paracelsus (1491–1541) developed the concept and published it in his writings. During the first half of the 16th century, Paracelsus traveled throughout Europe and to the Levant and Egypt, treating people and experimenting with new plants in search of more treatments and solutions. As a professor of medicine at the University of Basel, he dramatically burned classical medical texts by Theophrastus, Galen, Dioscorides and Avicenna, but not the works of Hippocrates.
The writings of Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) spread the doctrine of signatures - Böhme suggested that God marked objects with a sign, or "signature", for their purpose. A plant bearing parts that resembled human body-parts, animals, or other objects were thought to have useful relevance to those parts, animals or objects. The "signature" may also be identified in the environments or specific sites in which plants grew.
Read more about this topic: Doctrine Of Signatures
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)