The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1977) and Man and Nature in the Renaissance (1987), as well as papers concerning Spain, Portugal and even the Ottoman Empire.His latest work examines the history ofParacelsianism in France, where it played a particularly complex and prolonged part in the evolution of chemistry.At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Arabic medical texts were being replaced by Galenic translations, humanism's contribution to medicine, along with the Corpus Hermeticum, which stressed the relatedness of macrocosm and microcosm in the unity of the universe, a view also held by Paracelsus (1493-1 54 1 ) himself.By the middle of the century a strong disagreement erupted between the followers of Paracelsus, who considered themselves as innovators, and the French medical establishment, notably the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, which held fast to the Galenic tradition.Debus examines the entire mass of textual evidence, which stems from many French and Swiss cities in addition to Paris, and spreads well into the eighteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".