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:
“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)