Paracelsus gained his medical knowledge from women healers and lay people

Evidence

With his philosophical theories and medical practices, Paracelsus challenged the orthodoxy of the establishment. He advocated the freedom of ordinary people to study nature for themselves and believed in a self-active natural world and individual liberty. The bulk of his knowledge was obtained from lay people; his sources were women healers, barbers, bathkeepers, miners, and his own empirical observations, in addition to those of learned physicians; he visited universities only as a wandering journeyman scholar. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 515

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the polyad’s ecofeminist strand: pre-mechanistic science drew on women healers’ knowledge that the later expert regime suppressed.