Gerhard Dorn

Gerhard Dorn (about 1530 to 1584) was a philosopher, translator, alchemist, physician and bibliophile, born about 1530 in Mechelen in what is now Belgium. He studied with Adam von Bodenstein, to whom his first book is dedicated, and began publishing around 1565. Together with von Bodenstein he rescued many manuscripts of Paracelsus, printed them for the first time and translated many of them into Latin for the Basel publisher Pietro Perna, living in Basel in the 1570s and in Frankfurt in the early 1580s, where he died in his mid fifties. He was among the strongest advocates of Paracelsus, preferred theoretical study of the human mind to practical laboratory work, held the education of his day to be too scholastic, and told alchemists to reject the philosophy of Aristotle. He argued for a mystical and spiritual philosophy of love, and his principal writings are in volume one of the Theatrum Chemicum.