Jan Baptist van Helmont

• Born: March 19, 1715
• Died: June 08, 1790
• Genres: Classical

Biography

Helmont composed numerous masses, motets, other sacred works and pieces for the harpsichord as well as pieces for the orchestra. He studied with Brehy and became an organist at Ste Gudule in Brussels. In 1737 he was choirmaster of the church of Notre Dame and in 1741 returned to Ste Gudule. His music was sacred and the motet was set for four voives and instruments with an occasional vocal soloist. Other qualities of the motets included organ continuo, solo recitatives, arias, duos, choruses, highly decorated melodies and rhythms that were ambitious. Having been influenced by Rameau Helmont's harpsichord music, "Pieces de clavecin," included rondo forms, and possible minuets, gavottes and gigues. His organ fugues were also flavored by French tastes. ~ Keith Johnson, All Music Guide

Flemish chemist and physician (1579–1644)

Van Helmont, who came from a noble Brussels family, was educated at the Catholic University of Louvain in medicine, mysticism, and chemistry, but declined a degree from them. Rejecting all offers of employment he devoted himself to private research at his home. In 1621 he was involved in a controversy with the Church over the belief that it was possible to heal a wound caused by a weapon by treating the weapon rather than the wound. Van Helmont did not reject this common belief but insisted that it was a natural phenomenon containing no supernatural elements. He was arrested, eventually allowed to remain under house arrest, and forbidden to publish without the prior consent of the Church. He wrote extensively and after his death his collected papers were published by his son as the Ortus medicinae (1648; Origin of Medicine).

Van Helmont rejected the works of the ancients, although he did believe in the philosopher's stone. He carried out careful observations and measurements, which led him to discover the elementary nature of water. He regarded water as the chief constituent of matter. He pointed out that fish were nourished by water and that substantial bodies could be reduced to water by dissolving them in acid. To demonstrate his theory he performed a famous experiment in which he grew a willow tree over a period of five years in a measured quantity of earth. The tree increased its weight by 164 pounds despite the fact that only water was added to it. The soil had decreased by only a few ounces.

Van Helmont also introduced the term ‘gas’ into the language, deriving it from the Greek for chaos. When a substance is burned it is reduced to its formative agent and its gas and van Helmont believed that when 62 pounds of wood is burned to an ash weighing 1 pound, 61 pounds have escaped as water or gas. Different substances give off different gases when consumed and van Helmont identified four gases, which he named gas carbonum, two kinds of gas sylvester, and gas pingue. These we would now call carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and methane.

(b Brussels, 19 March 1715; d there, 8 June 1790). South Netherlands composer. He was titular organist at Ste Gudule, Brussels, and became choirmaster there in 1741, after four years at Notre Dame de la Chapelle. He composed mostly sacred music, including masses and numerous motets, in an italianate style. Among his other works are keyboard pieces reflecting French influence, an opera and a divertissement. His son Adrien-Joseph (1747-1830), his successor at Ste Gudule, composed sacred music and an opéra comique.

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

Jan Baptista van Helmont was born of a noble family in Brussels in January 1579. He studied the classics at the University of Louvain until 1594, but he did not accept a degree because he considered academic honors a mere vanity. He also studied aspects of magic and mystical philosophy in courses given by Jesuit teachers at their recently founded Louvain school, and then he turned to the study of such mystical spiritual writers as Thomas à Kempis. Dissatisfied with all these studies, he turned to medicine. In his new undertaking he was inspired by religious zeal and by the desire to be of service to society.

After obtaining his license to practice, Van Helmont was invited to lecture on surgery at the University of Louvain. However, he contracted a case of scabies and found the orthodox treatment by harsh purgatives to be debilitating and ineffective. He was eventually cured by Paracelsian mineral remedies, but meanwhile, disillusioned with the medical science of the time, Van Helmont abandoned his medical career and for 10 years traveled through Europe. He married a wealthy noblewoman, Margaret van Ranst, in 1609 and settled on an estate in Vilvorde near Brussels to devote himself to chemical philosophy.

Following the publication of his treatise on the magnetic cure of wounds, which was directed against a Jesuit, Van Helmont came to the attention of the Inquisition. A charge was brought against him, and this affair cast a shadow over the remainder of his life, which ended on Dec. 30, 1644; he was not acquitted until 2 years after his death. This circumstance possibly made him reluctant to publish much during his lifetime. His son Franciscus Mercurius published his papers posthumously in 1648 under the title Ortus medicinae (Origins of Medicine).

Van Helmont lived precisely in that era of the 17th century when modern scientific method based upon observation and experiment was being forged, but as yet science was not identified either uniquely or exclusively with this approach. For Van Helmont knowledge was a divine gift of God: there was no one way to understand the creation; man had to utilize all the means God had given him, including study of the Scriptures, prayer, meditation, mystical illumination, and direct observation of nature. Like most Paracelsians, Van Helmont distrusted the dialectical mode of reasoning that the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages used and the natural philosophy of the Greeks. Experience, both mystical and empirical, was the route to knowledge, not verbal reasoning.

Theory of the Elements

These varied aspects of Van Helmont's thought are nowhere better illustrated than in his theory of the elements. Rejecting the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, of Aristotle and the three principles, salt, sulfur, and mercury, of Paracelsus, Van Helmont settles on two elements as the basic constituents of the material universe: air and water. Only one of the elements, water, undergoes chemical change: air is simply a physical matrix which contains various vapors and exhalations but does not enter into chemical combination. All material substances, with the exception of air, are thus modified forms of water.

Van Helmont found support for his elemental water theory in the account of creation given in Genesis. To account for the diversity of material forms derived from the primal water, Van Helmont postulated a series of directing and generating principles which he called ferments or seminal principles. They were links between the material world and the spiritual world and as such had a key place in Van Helmont's natural philosophy.

Van Helmont tried to demonstrate his water theory by means of quantitative experiment. He planted a tree in a pot containing a weighed amount of earth. For 5 years he nourished the tree only with water. He found that the weight of the tree had gained 164 pounds while the weight of the earth in the pot was approximately the same as at the beginning of the experiment. He thus attributed the increase in weight of the tree to the assimilation and transformation of water into the substance of the tree.

Concept of Gas

Van Helmont's concept of gas, a word he coined from the Greek chaos, was an integral part of his water-ferment theory of matter. He recognized gases as specific individual chemical entities distinguished from air, but here the comparison with the modern chemical idea of gas ends. A gas to Van Helmont was primal water modified by a specific ferment: each body in nature contains such a gas and under specific conditions, for example, by heating, this gas can be liberated. Van Helmont described the production of such a gas. After burning 62 pounds of charcoal, only 1 pound of ashes remained. He assumed the other 61 pounds had changed into a wild spirit or gas (he called it gas sylvestre) that could not be contained in a vessel. He obtained the same gas by burning organic matter and alcohol and by fermenting wine and beer.

Ferments also play a major role in Van Helmont's biological and medical theories. He hypothesized that each of the principal organs of the body contained an individual ferment which controlled and directed the function of that organ, particularly the assimilation of foodstuff into the tissue of the body. This view led him to study the particular action of the various organs and to the recognition of the role of acid in the digestive process of the stomach.

To Van Helmont, diseases were caused by the invasion of the body by foreign ferments which interfered with the controlling action of the ferments of particular organs. Thus diseases had to be studied and treated as individual specific complaints with their own individual and specific cures. Although the Helmontian view of nature did not claim many adherents in the second half of the 17th century, his works were widely read and appreciated as a source of novel ideas and experiments.

Further Reading

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

Additional Sources

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

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

For more information on Jan Baptista van Helmont, visit Britannica.com.

Helmont, Jan Baptista van (yän bäptĭs'tä vän hĕl'mônt) , 1577–1644, Flemish physician, chemist, and physicist. He attributed physiological changes to chemical causes, but his conclusions were colored by his speculative mysticism. He discovered carbon dioxide, distinguished gases as a class of substances (as contrasted with solids and liquids), and is credited with introducing the term gas in its present scientific sense. His chief work is Ortus medicinae (1648).

Helmont, Jean Baptiste Van (1579–1644; also known as Johannes von Helmont), Flemish chemist. Born at Brussels, Helmont studied at the University of Louvain, where dissatisfaction with the curriculum in philosophy led him to pursue medicine. He obtained a medical degree in 1599 but soon grew critical as well of ancient medical authorities. After seven years of travel and independent study he emerged as an iatrochemist, mixing chemistry with natural philosophy and medicine. In this regard Helmont followed in the tradition of Paracelsus, although with notable differences. He rejected symbolic analogies linking the macrocosm with the microcosm and considered that the Paracelsian first principles (sulfur, salt, and mercury) were created through chemical processes rather than being preexistent in material substances. While accepting the existence of sympathies in nature, he believed these to occur naturally and not as a result of supernatural forces. This last view brought him into an already raging controversy concerning the so-called weapon salve (an ointment that supposedly cured wounds after being applied not to the wound itself but to the weapon that had caused it). Although disparaging magical or diabolic explanations, Helmont thought that a certain magnetic sympathy nevertheless existed not between the weapon and the wound, but between the wound and the blood left on the weapon that had caused it. The same type of magnetic sympathy, he believed, also accounted for the effects of sacred relics. "Propositions" such as this led to his condemnation by the Spanish Inquisition and, thereafter, to his imprisonment. His collected works came to light after his death, edited and published (1648) by his son, Franciscus Mercurius (1614?–1699; also known as Francisco Mercurio van Helmont).

Much of Helmont's medical philosophy was concerned with the activity of a vital spirit in nature. All things in nature, he believed, arose from spiritual seeds planted into the medium of elementary water. By means of a ferment, which determined the form, function, and direction of all animals, vegetables, and minerals, the seed mingled with water to become an individual entity. To find the invisible seeds of bodies he studied the chemical nature of smoke arising from combusted solids and fluids. It was this "specific smoke" that he termed gas, a name that for Helmont carried spiritual and religious connotations within a vitalist cosmology. Another term, blas, represented a universal motive power, present in nature and in every human being.

Like Paracelsus, Helmont believed that the key to understanding nature was to be found in chemistry, and a good deal of his attention was given to techniques of quantification and to determining the weights of substances in chemical reactions. In his famous tree experiment he compared the weight of water given to a growing tree with respect to the weight of the tree itself. Against Aristotle, and on the basis of observations of a burning candle surrounded by a glass container resting in water, he argued that air could be diminished or contracted, thus making possible the existence of a vacuum in nature. He also advanced techniques for various chemical preparations, especially chemical medicines involving mercury, and advocated a corpuscularian, or particulate, view of matter. Following upon earlier suggestions, Helmont determined that acid was the digestive agent of the stomach and defended the Paracelsian idea of a medicinal liquor alkahest, which, it was claimed, could reduce every body into its first matter.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Helmont, Johannes von. Ortus Medicinae. Edited by Francisco Mercurio van Helmont. Amsterdam, 1648. Reprint. Brussels, 1966.

Secondary Sources

Clericuzio, Antonio. "From van Helmont to Boyle . . . , " British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993): 303–343.

Debus, Allen. The Chemical Philosophy. New York, 1977. Reprint. Mineola, N.Y., 2002, pp. 295–343.

Pagel, Walter. Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1982.

—BRUCE T. MORAN

(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.

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