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Updated: June 6, 2025
Van Helmont, a celebrated alchemist physician who flourished during the brilliant reign of Louis XIV, wrote: "The smells which arise from the bottom of morasses produce frogs, slugs, leeches, grasses, and other things."
Disease of any part represents a strike on the part of the local Archeus, who refuses to work. Though full of fanciful ideas, Van Helmont had the experimental spirit and was the first chemist to discover the diversity of gases. Like his teacher, he was in revolt against the faculty, and he has bitter things to say of physicians.
Other cures for which van Helmont vouched included a man who was exceedingly fat; he touched the stone every morning with the tip of his tongue and very speedily lost weight. Van Helmont's own wife was cured of a marked edema of the leg. Similarly, a servant maid who had had severe attacks of erysipelas which were "badly cured," and the leg leaden colored and swollen, was cured almost immediately.
For an account of Fludd and the English Rosicrucians see Craven's Life of Fludd, Kirkwall, 1902. A school of a more rational kind followed directly upon the work of Paracelsus, in which the first man of any importance was Van Helmont. The Paracelsian Archeus was the presiding spirit in living creatures, and worked through special local ferments, by which the functions of the organs are controlled.
At the present day, however, we even more commonly use another name for this peculiar liquid namely, "alcohol," and its origin is not less singular. The Dutch physician, Van Helmont, lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century in the transition period between alchemy and chemistry and was rather more alchemist than chemist.
Van Helmont cites the case of a tailor's wife at Mechlin, who during a conflict outside her house, on seeing a soldier lose his hand at her door, gave birth to a daughter with one hand, the other hand being a bleeding stump; he also speaks of the case of the wife of a merchant at Antwerp, who after seeing a soldier's arm shot off at the siege of Ostend gave birth to a daughter with one arm.
For van Helmont, Air was one of the four 'Elements', EARTH, WATER, AIR, and FIRE. Of these, the first two were held to constitute the realm of the 'created things', the other two that of the 'uncreated things'. A brief study of the old doctrine of the Four Elements is necessary at this point in order to understand the meaning of these concepts.
VAN HELMONT, in his library and his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily experienced during thirty years; nor would the enthusiast yield up to the emperor one of those golden and visionary days!
However, even more important was the work of van Helmont, who developed and extended the doctrines of Paracelsus and represented a major force in seventeenth-century thought.
"Never speak of that" the moribund will exclaim with a shudder; such is the ever- present horror of their dreadful and dreary times of sickness, always aggravated by suspicions of witchcraft, the only cause which their imperfect knowledge of physics can assign to death even Van Helmont asserted, "Deus non fecit mortem."
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