Abstract
To honour the memory of Paracelsus, who died four hundred years ago, the Institute of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University has issued four of his treatises in English translation. In a review of this volume in NATURE (May 9, 1942, p. 510) the statement occurs that Paracelsus “borrowed much, without acknowledgement, from Basil Valentine”. To many of us who have formed a definite picture of Paracelsus's character, plagiarism would seem to be the last fault of which he might be rightly accused, and as this imputation (which has been frequently made since the seventeenth century) nullifies to a certain extent the purpose of the memorial volume, it might be permitted to ask whether this slur upon the character of the great man is well founded.
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PANETH, F. Paracelsus and “Basil Valentine”. Nature 150, 380 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150380a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150380a0
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