n.Swiss physician who introduced treatments of particular illnesses based on his observation and experience; he saw illness as having an external cause (rather than an imbalance of humors) and replaced traditional remedies with chemical remedies (1493-1541)
She cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner, " with its frozen polar wastes and specters of "Nightmare Life-in-Death, " which as an 8-year-old child she had heard the poet recite in her father's parlor, and she made several dark allusions to the alchemical experiments of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, two Medieval figures with whom Percy had become obsessed during his studies at Oxford.