Van Helmont, Jean Baptiste (1577-1644)

Belgian physician, chemist, and physiologist, whose research was associated with occult theories. He was born to an aristocratic family in Brussels. Studying at Louvain, he attained early distinction in mathematics, lecturing on physics at the age of 17. Before he was 22, he had read Hippocrates and the Greek and Arabian authors, had become eminent in the doctrines of Aristotle and Galen, and had practiced medicine, according to Vopiscus and Plempius.

In the year 1599, he received his Ph.D. in medicine. After this, he spent some years in the practice of medicine, but meeting a follower of Paracelsus, he became interested in the theories of chemical medicine to such a degree that he retired to the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, to spend the rest of his life in the study of experimental chemistry, on which he wrote various treatises, becoming famous throughout Europe for his scientific knowledge.

He revolutionized medicine as known in his day, turning aside from the theories of Galen and the Arabs, and creating an epoch in the history of physiology, being the first to recognize the functions of the stomach and its relation to the other organs of the body.

Van Helmont's many and varied experiments led him to deal with aerial fluids, to which he gave the name of gas— carbonic acid gas being his discovery—and it is said that without him the chemistry of steel in all probability would have been unknown to science.

Van Helmont is remembered as an alchemist more than a scientist. Alchemy, with its visions of the elixir of life and the philosophers' stone, presented itself to him as another field of experiment and research. Although he never pretended to the art of making the transmuting powder, he testified his belief in the transmutation of metals, claiming to have seen the experiment performed many times.

Among other things he became a firm believer in mineral and human magnetism, anticipating Franz Anton Mesmer in almost the very terms of the later exponent of the theory, and basing his argument on the observed sympathy or antagonism that seems to spontaneously arise between individuals and the influence exerted by a firm will over a weak imagination.

In 1609, he retired to Vilvorde, near Brussels, and devoted himself to medical practice and chemical experiments. He declined to leave his retirement, although his fame brought him flattering invitations and offers from the Emperor and the Elector Palatine. Almost unknown to his neighbors, he attended anyone stricken by illness without accepting any fees for his services.

His published writings included: De Magnetica Vulnerum naturali et Legitima Curatione (1621), De aquis Leondiensibus medicatis (1624), Opuscula Medica inaudita (1641), and Febrium doctrina maudita (1642). Some of these were translated into Dutch, French, and German. English translations of his tracts include: A Ternary of Paradoxes; The Magnetick Cure of Wounds, The Nativity of Tartar in Wine, The Image of God in Man (1650), and Deliramenta Catarrhi: or the Incongruities, Impossibilities and Absurdities couched under the vulgar opinion of Defluxions (1650).

He died December 30, 1644.