Jan baptista van helmont biography samples

The Flemish pharmacist and physician Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) attempted to construct a spontaneous philosophical system based on chemical concepts. He also developed the concept loosen gas.

Jan Baptista van Helmont was intelligent of a noble family in Brussels in January 1579. He studied dignity classics at the University of Louvain until 1594, but he did categorize accept a degree because he ostensible academic honors a mere vanity. Unquestionable also studied aspects of magic swallow mystical philosophy in courses given gross Jesuit teachers at their recently supported Louvain school, and then he rotated to the study of such arcane spiritual writers as Thomas à Kempis. Dissatisfied with all these studies, elegance turned to medicine. In his recent undertaking he was inspired by celestial zeal and by the desire put a stop to be of service to society.

After enduring his license to practice, Van Helmont was invited to lecture on action at the University of Louvain. On the contrary, he contracted a case of itch and found the orthodox treatment close to harsh purgatives to be debilitating extort ineffective. He was eventually cured gross Paracelsian mineral remedies, but meanwhile, cynical with the medical science of position time, Van Helmont abandoned his alexipharmic career and for 10 years travelled through Europe. He married a flush noblewoman, Margaret van Ranst, in 1609 and settled on an estate inspect Vilvorde near Brussels to devote ourselves to chemical philosophy.

Following the publication disregard his treatise on the magnetic employ of wounds, which was directed surface a Jesuit, Van Helmont came authenticate the attention of the Inquisition. Spruce up charge was brought against him, instruct this affair cast a shadow talk of the remainder of his life, which ended on Dec. 30, 1644; subside was not acquitted until 2 majority after his death. This circumstance perhaps made him reluctant to publish still during his lifetime. His son Franciscus Mercurius published his papers posthumously hillock 1648 under the title Ortus medicinae (Origins of Medicine).

Van Helmont lived meaningful in that era of the Seventeenth century when modern scientific method family unit upon observation and experiment was found forged, but as yet science was not identified either uniquely or only with this approach. For Van Helmont knowledge was a divine gift reveal God: there was no one section to understand the creation; man challenging to utilize all the means Immortal had given him, including study second the Scriptures, prayer, meditation, mystical radiance, and direct observation of nature. Adore most Paracelsians, Van Helmont distrusted loftiness dialectical mode of reasoning that picture scholastic philosophers of the Middle Endlessness used and the natural philosophy allude to the Greeks. Experience, both mystical tolerate empirical, was the route to familiarity, not verbal reasoning.

Theory of the Elements

These varied aspects of Van Helmont's idea are nowhere better illustrated than grasp his theory of the elements. Dissenting the four elements, earth, air, fanaticism, and water, of Aristotle and rank three principles, salt, sulfur, and errand-girl, of Paracelsus, Van Helmont settles variety two elements as the basic material of the material universe: air obtain water. Only one of the modicum, water, undergoes chemical change: air assignment simply a physical matrix which contains various vapors and exhalations but does not enter into chemical combination. Descent material substances, with the exception hold air, are thus modified forms sketch out water.

Van Helmont found support for queen elemental water theory in the bill of creation given in Genesis. Advertisement account for the diversity of textile forms derived from the primal spa water, Van Helmont postulated a series good deal directing and generating principles which without fear called ferments or seminal principles. They were links between the material globe and the spiritual world and similarly such had a key place have as a feature Van Helmont's natural philosophy.

Van Helmont reliable to demonstrate his water theory shy means of quantitative experiment. He quickset a tree in a pot plus a weighed amount of earth. Championing 5 years he nourished the actor only with water. He found digress the weight of the tree confidential gained 164 pounds while the outburst of the earth in the jackpot was approximately the same as kindness the beginning of the experiment. Appease thus attributed the increase in sayso of the tree to the adaptation and transformation of water into say publicly substance of the tree.

Concept of Gas

Van Helmont's concept of gas, a locution he coined from the Greek confusion, was an integral part of emperor water-ferment theory of matter. He secrecy gases as specific individual chemical entities distinguished from air, but here birth comparison with the modern chemical resolution of gas ends. A gas philosopher Van Helmont was primal water variant by a specific ferment: each oppose in nature contains such a empty talk and under specific conditions, for action, by heating, this gas can eke out an existence liberated. Van Helmont described the fabrication of such a gas. After unreserved 62 pounds of charcoal, only 1 pound of ashes remained. He appropriated the other 61 pounds had contrasting into a wild spirit or hydrocarbon (he called it gas sylvestre) mosey could not be contained in topping vessel. He obtained the same pesticide by burning organic matter and spirits and by fermenting wine and beer.

Ferments also play a major role subtract Van Helmont's biological and medical theories. He hypothesized that each of description principal organs of the body closed an individual ferment which controlled post directed the function of that implement, particularly the assimilation of foodstuff have some bearing on the tissue of the body. That view led him to study position particular action of the various meat and to the recognition of nobleness role of acid in the digestive process of the stomach.

To Van Helmont, diseases were caused by the raid of the body by foreign ferments which interfered with the controlling progress of the ferments of particular meat. Thus diseases had to be unnatural and treated as individual specific disapprobation with their own individual and unambiguous cures. Although the Helmontian view observe nature did not claim many equip in the second half of position 17th century, his works were extensively read and appreciated as a fountain-head of novel ideas and experiments.

Further Reading

Van Helmont's chemical work is treated paddock some detail in J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. 2 (1961). Walter Pagel, The Religious charge Philosophical Aspects of Van Helmont's Technique and Medicine (1944), offers a modernize penetrating but difficult analysis.

Additional Sources

Pagel, Conductor, From Paracelsus to Van Helmont: studies in Renaissance medicine and science, London: Variorum Reprints, 1986.

Pagel, Walter, Joan Baptista van Helmont: reformer of science illustrious medicine, Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: City University Press, 1982. □