Encyclopedia
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a
Flemish chemist, physiologist and
physician. Alternate versions of his given names are
Johannes Baptista or
Joan Baptista.
Early life
Born into a noble family in
Brussels, he was educated at
Leuven, and after ranging restlessly from one science to another and finding satisfaction in none, turned to
medicine, in which he took his doctor's degree in 1599. The next few years he spent in travelling through
Switzerland,
Italy,
France, and
England. Returning to his own country he was at
Antwerp at the time of the great plague in 1605, and having contracted a rich marriage settled in 1609 at
Vilvoorde, near Brussels, where he occupied himself with chemical experiments and medical practice until his death.
Chemist or Alchemist?
Van Helmont presents curious contradictions. On the one hand he was a disciple of
Paracelsus , a
mystic with strong leanings to the supernatural, an
alchemist who believed that with a small piece of the philosopher's stone he had transmuted 2,000 times as much mercury into
gold; on the other hand he was touched with the new learning that was producing men like
Harvey,
Galileo and
Bacon, a careful observer of nature, and an exact experimenter who in some cases realized that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. As a chemist he deserves to be regarded as the founder of pneumatic chemistry, even though it made no substantial progress for a century after his time, and he was the first to understand that there are gases distinct in kind from atmospheric air.
Tree planting experiment
The very word "gas" he claims as his own invention, and he perceived that his "gas sylvestre" given off by burning
charcoal is the same as that produced by fermenting must and that which sometimes renders the air of caves irrespirable. For him air and water are the two primitive elements of things. Fire he explicitly denies to be an element, and earth is not one because it can be reduced to water. That plants, for instance, are composed of water he sought to show by the ingenious quantitative experiment of planting a
willow weighing 5 lb in 200 lb of dry soil and allowing it to grow for five years; at the end of that time it had become a tree weighing 169 lb , and since it had received nothing but water and the soil weighed practically the same as at the beginning, he argued that the increased weight of wood, bark and roots had been formed from water alone.
Fermentation
It was an old idea that the processes of the living body are fermentative in character, but he applied it more elaborately than any of his predecessors. For him
digestion,
nutrition, and even movement are due to ferments, which convert dead food into living flesh in six stages. But having got so far, with the application of chemical principles to physiological problems, he introduces a complicated system of supernatural agencies like the
archeus of Paracelsus, which preside over and direct the affairs of the body. A central
archeus controls a number of subsidiary
archei which move through the ferments, and just as diseases are primarily caused by some affection of the archeus, so remedies act by bringing it back to the normal.
At the same time chemical principles guided him in the choice of medicines--undue acidity of the digestive juices, for example, was to be corrected by alkalis and vice versa; he was thus a forerunner of the iatrochemical school, and did good service to the art of medicine by applying chemical methods to the preparation of drugs. Over and above the
archeus he taught that there is the sensitive soul which is the husk or shell of the immortal mind. Before the
Fall the
archeus obeyed the immortal mind and was directly controlled by it, but at the Fall men received also the sensitive soul and with it lost immortality, for when it perishes the immortal mind can no longer remain in the body.
In addition to the
archeus, which he described as "aura vitalis seminum, vitae directrix," Van Helmont had other governing agencies resembling the archeus and not always clearly distinguished from it. From these he invented the term
blas, defined as the "vis motus tam alterivi quam localis." Of blas there were several kinds, e.g.
blas humanum and
blas meteoron; the heavens he said "constare gas materiâ et blas efficiente."
Religious views
He was a faithful Catholic, but incurred the suspicion of the Church by his tract
De magnetica vulnerum curatione , which defended
Rudolf Goclenius, Jr., a
Calvinist professor of medicine at the
University of Marburg, against the
Jesuit Johannes Roberti. The
Spanish Inquisition persecuted him as it was thought that his "magnetic cure" derogated from some of the miracles. From 1633 to 1636, he was arrested and could not publish until 1642. His works were collected and published at Amsterdam as
Ortus medicinae, vel opera et opuscula omnia in 1648 by his son
Franz Mercurius , in whose own writings e.g.
Cabbalah Denudata and
Opuscula philosophica mystical
theosophy and alchemy appear in still wilder confusion.
Publications
- 1621 - De magnetica vulnerum curatione. Disputatio, contra opinionem d. Ioan. Roberti in brevi sua anatome sub censurae specie exaratam, Paris
- 1642 - Febrium doctrina inaudita, Antverpiae
- 1644 - Opuscula medica inaudit
- 1648 - Ortus medicinae, id est Initia physicae inaudita
References
See Michael Foster,
Lectures on the History of Physiology ;
Michel Chevreul in
Journ. des savants . Other authorities are Poultier d'Elmoth,
Mémoire sur J. B. van Helmont ; Rixner and Sieber,
Beiträge zur Geschichte der Physiologie , vol. ii.; Spiers,
Helmont's System der Medicin ; Melsens,
Leçons sur van Helmont ; Rommelaere,
Études sur J. B. van Helmont .
Also see Walter Pagel,
From Paracelcus to Van Helmont: Studies in Renaissance Medicine and Science and Walter Pagel,
Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine .
