Here it is at last, the Paracelsus book that some of us have been waiting for for years, ever since we learnt in the 1970s that this was one of Charles Webster's projects. It is not that Webster has been a slow worker. Far from it: it is just that he has been busy with other things. One of these other things, his history of the National Health Service in Britain – itself a task large enough, you would have thought, for a whole team of historians – is not even mentioned in the dust jacket sketch of the author's achievements! He has accomplished at least twice what a normal scholar might have achieved in a working lifetime. But now Paracelsus's turn has at last come, and Webster is able to take advantage of several decades of fresh scholarship in sixteenth-century studies. In the 1970s, of course, it was still a matter of dispute within our profession whether Paracelsus and alchemists were proper subjects for us to study, or whether they simply represented a philosophical and medical dead end. This brilliant book, I think, settles the matter: Paracelsus was not a weirdo who can simply be dismissed from our accounts of the history of the study of nature and medicine, but a central challenging figure whose impact in the sixteenth century continues to have resonances today.

‘Let him not be another's, who can be his own’. It is perhaps the most celebrated of Parcelsus's remarks, and appears on his earliest portraits as ‘Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest’. It is a claim about individuality, about identity and about originality – quite apart from what it might be said to be saying against the feudal political, social and economic structures of Paracelsus's own time. But Paracelsus has actually been made other people's more than any other dead curer. He has been adopted as a hero by modern scientists and modern lunatics, by Nazis and psychoanalysts, as someone who in some way – some very important but usually very imprecise way – prefigured their own concerns and designs.

Half a century ago, Walter Pagel presented Paracelsus as a philosophical physician of the Renaissance, and he attempted to specify how in Paracelsus's doctrines ‘mystical, magical and scientific elements are all blended together into a single doctrine’ (Pagel, Paracelsus, 1958, p. 4). This is the Paracelsus who has been dominant in the interpretations by English-speaking historians until recent reconsiderations.

Now Webster has come forward as Parcelsus's modern-day advocate to say who he was, what he did and why, and to present him to us. In politics advocates often undertake to represent the oppressed, the poor, the vulnerable and the dispossessed. Charles Webster presents himself as the advocate of the much-misunderstood Paracelsus, armed with a probably unrivalled mastery of the sources. In particular he has been able to consult the voluminous ‘theological, social and ethical writings’ (p. xi) of Paracelsus which have appeared in the last half-century, and it is these which Webster considers constitute the core of the real Paracelsus. So it is evident at the outset that Webster's Paracelsus will be much more of a socially, religiously and politically engaged figure than Pagel's Paracelsus, who almost seemed to live in a unique (and very strange) philosophical bubble. Webster's Paracelsus is much more a man of his political time, where Pagel's may be described as being a man of his intellectual time. Webster seeks to explore every facet of Paracelsus the social, political, religious and medical reformer.

Paracelsus is undoubtedly an important historical figure, and one who plays a significant role in the history of medicine and chemistry. He is, as Webster remarks, the most famous physician who ever lived. But it is still devilishly difficult to put one's finger on precisely what he is famous for, either in medicine or in any other area of human life. Webster gives us an account which is both biographical and thematic, placing Paracelsus firmly within his local, social, political, medical, intellectual and religious contexts, portraying him as ‘our turbulent reformer’ (p. xii). But there were so many voices against him in his time, there have been so many misinterpretations of him since: the campaign to blacken his character and to blame his actions on personality defects began even before he died. He was accused by those who knew him of being a drunkard, being in contact with demons and practising magic.

After the Peasants' War, from 1525, there were many visionaries predicting the end of time, and Webster presents Paracelsus as one of these, and not an isolated crank. But Paracelsus was not just a negative and despondent voice: Webster presents him as energetically producing ‘a blueprint for scientific and medical reform as well as social transformation’ (p. 9), and as doing so in a rapidly changing economic and political environment.

One of the dimensions of Paracelsus's life that Webster explores, for the first time, is his connection with ‘the book’ – with printing and publishing. The vast quantity of printed material and manuscript is placed here in the context of the ‘history of the book’ which has been of such importance to other historians in recent decades. He even talks of ‘“Paracelsus”: birth of a brand’, indicating how important was control of one's image in the new printed media, and how Paracelsus sometimes favoured pamphlet publication in opposition to the formal treatises of traditional medical men in order to get his message across to his intended audience.

The role of magic in Paracelsus's beliefs is explained by his initial fascination with the Magi, and his view that spiritual enlightenment was a precondition for all other change. Indeed, magic is shown to have underlain all Paracelsus's medicine, and to have biblical sanction. Paracelsus's religious position, a disputed issue among historians, is placed as being close to that of the Anabaptists (p. 30). The direct link in language and concepts from Paracelsus's religious to his medical thinking is well developed, showing how, like many of his contemporaries, he attacked the exclusive institutions of the professions, especially of medicine, whose practitioners he regarded as parasites and compared to the corrupt priesthood.

With respect to the novel kind of medicine that Paracelsus constructed and advocated, Webster shows not only its inner coherence, but also its coherence with radical religious views of the time, including those held by Paracelsus himself: health and cure were a matter of inner spirituality, not something at the mercy of the imbalance of humours.

All in all this new account of that mysterious but compelling character Paracelsus will be widely welcome and will provide the stimulus for further study of this fascinating period of revolutionary strife in Europe, which its participants believed to be a turning point in world history: nothing less than the approach of the Second Coming. But in warmly welcoming this new account of Paracelsus, I nevertheless have one reservation, which is to do with the role of historian as advocate. The downside to working as an advocate is that one is always speaking on behalf of one's client. The client is rarely heard. Sometimes an advocate will deliberately keep his client silent lest he give the game away and incriminate himself. Indeed I was astonished to find quite how silent Paracelsus is in this book. Once I noticed that I could not hear Paracelsus speaking in his own voice, I actually went back and looked again at the whole text in detail to check my impression. Each chapter begins with a printed image from the period, and with a quotation in German, usually from Paracelsus, which sets the theme for the chapter. The publishers have done Webster a real disservice here, by presenting the images as tiny little things in which it is difficult to see anything much, and with the pertinent quotations in small type. (And with the translation of each of these quotations – the essence, as it were, of the chapter that follows – only in the endnotes; all of which makes Paracelsus even less audible.) But that is almost it, except for the odd phrase or term of abuse. Thereafter Paracelsus never speaks again in his own voice.

This is a pity because, as Jung is quoted here saying about Paracelsus, he treats his reader like ‘an invisible auditor afflicted with moral deafness’ (quoted on p. 59). We are told that Paracelsus wrote ‘in his own lively manner’ (p. 85). Certainly we hear lots about what Paracelsus said and what he wrote, but it is always reported, always summarized or paraphrased, almost never directly in his own voice. And this advocacy way of writing means we are always having Paracelsus interpreted to us as he is being reported to us. I am absolutely certain that if one were to go to the Paracelsian text being discussed at a given moment, then one would find that, yes, Paracelsus does say what Webster reports him as saying, for Webster is of course a scrupulous scholar. But that is not my point – my point is: why can we not hear him himself? Have we failed to capture him again? Or, as Paracelsus himself might have put it (though probably not in Latin, which he despised), ‘Let him not be another's, who can be his own’.