Jan Baptista van Helmont

Flemish chemist, physician, and mystic

• Born: January 12, 1580
• Birthplace: Brussels, United Provinces (now in Belgium)
• Died: December 30, 1644
• Place of death: Vilvoorde, Spanish Netherlands (now in Belgium)

Helmont was among the first to introduce the methods and results of chemistry into the science of medicine. He discovered carbonic acid and carbon dioxide, coined the term “gas,” invented gravimetry for urinalysis, and made several advances in physiology and pharmacology.

Early Life

Jan Baptista van Helmont was born to privilege in the Flemish landed gentry, the son of Brabant state counselor Christian van Helmont and Brussels socialite Marie de Stassart. His marriage to Margerite van Ranst in 1609 connected him to the influential Merode family, but he never used his rank for personal gain.

He was always intellectual, inquisitive, otherworldly, and skeptical almost to the point of iconoclasm. His quest for knowledge led him to travel throughout Europe and to experiment with different paths of learning. He studied with the Jesuits, but was more strongly influenced by magic and alchemy. He finally settled on a life that related mystical spirituality to natural science.

After immersing himself in a variety of subjects, including philosophy, geography, and law, Helmont earned his medical degree in 1599 at the University of Louvain and taught surgery there briefly. His medical career was voluntarily short. He opposed bloodletting and other violent but popular therapies. One story says that he gave up medicine when an Italian Paracelsian cured his scabies by applying sulfur and mercury after Galenic physicians had failed to cure it with emetics, purgatives, and herbal remedies. He quit practicing medicine around 1605, proclaiming that he would no longer make his living from the sufferings of others. Thereafter he dedicated his life to biomedical and biochemical research.

Life’s Work

Helmont’s main influences were the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and the physicians Hippocrates and Paracelsus. He distrusted Galen and most medieval medical authors, especially the Arabs. His method was empirical, but tempered by metaphysics. With his concepts of disease derived as much from speculation as from experience, he relied on Paracelsus regarding the importance of chemistry and alchemy in the practice of medicine. He adopted from Paracelsus the concept of “archaeus,” the governing spirit of each physiological process. The archaeus initiates and regulates the production of bodily ferments that work like enzymes to produce physiological results. The process is entirely chemical. Helmont additionally claimed that the soul was the ultimate source of physiological change, which meant that, to take care of the body, one must first take care of the soul.

Iatrochemistry, the brainchild of Helmont and German physician Franciscus Sylvius (Franz Deleboe), is a kind of bioscience based on the axiom that physiological processes are essentially chemical. Iatrochemistry was one of two major movements in seventeenth century medical research. The other, iatromechanism, whose main drivers were René Descartes and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli , reduced physiology to mechanics and concentrated on musculoskeletal relations, nerve reflexes, heart motion, digestive action, and optical physics. Both sides achieved much, but remained at odds. Moreover, dissension existed within each movement. Sylvius remained a Galenist, while Helmont’s departure in a Paracelsian direction led eventually to German physician Georg Ernst Stahl propounding medical animism, the theory that the soul directly causes all physiological events.

Helmont was the first to recognize that there are different kinds of gases, which he believed were different aspects of spirit. He coined the word “gas” as an alteration of the Greek and Latin word chaos, which means space, emptiness, boundlessness, or shapelessness. His experiments on fermentation and combustion advanced the knowledge of the products of these processes, especially the invisible products. He isolated carbon dioxide, which he called “gas sylvestre,” from wine fermentation, but did not distinguish adequately between carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. He also identified and described but misnamed and imperfectly understood chlorine, methane, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and several other gases, as well as carbonic acid.

Much of Helmont’s research concerned the chemical properties and physiological effects of acids, and he verified that digestion occurs because of acid. His experiments on digestive system acids dovetailed with his research into the effects of other acids on other organic tissues. He noticed that acid contributes to the formation of pus and that acids are involved in the formation of bodily gases. He devised methods of using specific gravity to test for the presence of metals in solution and to determine the contents of urine. He also conducted pathological research, where his most important results related to asthma, catarrh, and epilepsy.

Since he preferred medical to surgical and gentle to aggressive methods in medicine, most of Helmont’s practical clinical advances were in pharmacology. Like Paracelsus, he favored mercury as a therapeutic agent. The focus of most of his drug research was to improve the Paracelsian formulary.

Beginning in 1622, the Spanish Inquisition and other Roman Catholic authorities challenged the religious orthodoxy of Helmont’s science, mainly because of his adherence to Paracelsus. In 1625, the Inquisition cited twenty-seven of his assertions as heretical. The Church impounded his 1621 book, De magnetica vulnerum curatione (English translation in A Ternary of Paradoxes: The Magnetick Cure of Wounds, Nativity of Tartar in Wine, Image of God in Man , 1650). His teachings were officially banned by the University of Louvain from 1622 to 1634 because he was suspected of advocating or practicing magic. He was placed under house arrest from 1634 to 1636 and was not cleared until 1642. He conducted extensive research for the last four decades of his life, but because he could not receive an imprimatur between 1622 and 1642, he published very little.

The ecclesiastical persecution made Helmont’s writings that appeared during his lifetime scattered and unsystematic. In his last two years of life, he attempted to break out of that pattern, notably in 1644 with four essays published together as Opuscula medica inaudita (Unheard of Little Works on Medicine , 1664). The essays cover “diseases of the stone,” fevers, humours, and the plague.

His son, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, collected and edited his father’s works and published them in 1648 as Ortus medicinae (A Ternary of Paradoxes: The Magnetick Cure of Wounds, Nativity of Tartar in Wine, Image of God in Man , 1650). These two books are the foundation points of iatrochemistry. Although extracting Helmont’s scientific content from his mystical language is often difficult, this posthumous book is the basis of his fame as a scientist.

Significance

Helmont’s influence has proceeded in disparate ways. Because he blurred the distinction between natural science and mysticism to the extent that his metaphysical speculations and prejudices sometimes obscured the useful scientific results in his writings, his reputation as a scientist is less than it deserves to be. His emphasis on soul, spirit, and vital forces influenced animistic scientists such as Stahl, vitalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson, and, through Bergson, twentieth century process philosophy.

Despite his mysticism, Helmont is rightly regarded as one of the most important founders of biochemistry. His experiments with gases laid some of the groundwork for Joseph Black’s investigations of respiration in the eighteenth century. His iatrochemistry was a powerful bioscientific force in the second half of the seventeenth century, especially in Britain and the Low Countries, including among its adherents Thomas Willis , Jan Swammerdam , and Regnier de Graaf. His ontological views of diseases as separate entities helped to prepare the way for the nosological movement of the eighteenth century.

Like most physicians and others of his era, Helmont condescended to women, but his disdain for women’s ailments and even their nature was more explicit than most. In 1826, American obstetrician and gynecologist William Potts Dewees quoted with disapproval Helmont’s assertion that a woman is what she is only because of her uterus, a view common into the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Coulter, Harris L. The Origins of Modern Western Medicine: J. B. van Helmont to Claude Bernard. Vol. 2 in Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2000. The second of four volumes of a provocative view of the hegemony of regular medicine by an expert in the history of alternative medicine. Coulter sees Helmont as an important figure in the development of modern empiricism.

Debus, Allen G. Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave. Canton, Mass.: Science History, 2001. From the point of view of the history of chemistry, this innovative reinterpretation of the rivalries among early modern medical philosophies sets them in their larger cultural context and breaks stereotypes about them.

Ettinger, Jacqueline Erbrecht. J. B. van Helmont’s Heuristic Wound: Trauma and the Subversion of Humoral Theory. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Washington, 2001. Analyzes the concept of traumatic injury in Helmont’s writings to show that his theory of disease emerged from the paradox of iatrogenic wounds, that is, injuries caused by doctors.

Pagel, Walter. Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The standard biography of Helmont.

Pagel, Walter, and Marianne Winder, eds. From Paracelsus to van Helmont: Studies in Renaissance Medicine and Science. London: Variorum Reprints, 1986. A collected reissue of fifteen of Pagel’s scholarly articles, most of which concern Helmont in some way.

Schott, Heinz. “Paracelsus and van Helmont on Imagination: Magnetism and Medicine Before Mesmer.” In Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, edited by Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2002. An examination of Helmont’s work from the perspective of the history of medicine, the natural sciences, and religion. Includes illustrations, a bibliography, and an index.