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:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)