Word: bombastus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus, was a riproaring, swaggering Swiss who in his short life (1493-1541) completely upset the medieval practice of medicine. He learned medicine and surgery "from executioners, bathkeepers, gypsies, midwives, and fortune tellers and incidentally acquired an unusual knowledge of folk-medicine and a permanent taste for low company." He believed in gnomes, sylvans, sprites, salamanders, macrocosms, microcosms. He knew botany, alchemy. He feared no man and he broke the laws of his profession, his Government and his God. Before he died as the result of being stabbed in a tavern...
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