Who was Paracelsus and what did he believe and practice? This book presents Paracelsus as a more complex man - who used his eyes and ears to learn from nature how to heal, and who wrote influential books on medicine, surgery, alchemy and theology while living a drunken, combative, vagabond life.

Yet few thinkers have maintained quite so many deep, loyal and intellectually productive friendships. As he put it himself: 'I am different'. Philip Ball tells his extaordinary story, putting him in the context of his times, the years of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, of the end of magic, the beginnings of science and the birth of modern medicine.