"Paracelsus' greatest triumph was the use of mercury to treat , the new disease of the day. ...Paracelsus may have heard of the treatment in his travels... or the discovery may have been serendipitous, based on... the extension of the mercury-sulfur theory of the Islamic alchemists to a tria prima... of mercury (soul), sulfur (spirit), and salt (body). But... there is no record of the number of people he adversely affected while experimenting with potions that were not effective, which may have been considerable."