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:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)