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Updated: June 6, 2025
Franciscus Sylvius, a disciple of Van Helmont, established the first chemical laboratory in Europe at Leyden, and to him is due the introduction of modern clinical teaching. In 1664 he writes: "I have led my pupils by the hand to medical practice, using a method unknown at Leyden, or perhaps elsewhere, i.e., taking them daily to visit the sick at the public hospital.
'There is, my Lord Castlemallard, a curious old tract of the learned Van Helmont, in which he says, as near as I can remember his words, that magnetism is a magical faculty, which lieth dormant in us by the opiate of primitive sin, and, therefore, stands in need of an excitator, which excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with witches.
This virtue requires a metallic body in which to inhere. The general concept is not unfamiliar, of a virtue or power or ferment which was attached to a material object, and it is this type of explanation which was so preponderant in, for example, Porta's Natural Magick. Van Helmont speaks of the "first being," which translates the Latin Ens, of Venus or copper.
Neither did the live coals, which were lying about in plenty, burn him; for, being a water-baby, his radical humours were of a moist and cold nature, as you may read at large in Lemnius, Cardan, Van Helmont, and other gentlemen, who knew as much as they could, and no man can know more. And at last they came to chimney No. 345.
It is nevertheless just to Van Helmont to add that his conception of the vital principle was very far from being as purely materialistic as it would seem to those unacquainted with his writings; for he carefully distinguishes that principle of life which he ascribes to a gas, and by which he means the sensuous animal life, from the intellectual immortal principle of soul.
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of mystics, Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc.
2 For Van Helmont, owing to the Flemish pronunciation of the letter G, the two words sounded more alike than their spelling suggests. 3 In a later chapter we shall have opportunity to determine what distinguishes Air from Fire, on the one hand, and Water from Earth on the other.
That is, he could not trace out the logical connection between first principles and the particular case. Galenism suffered especially from logical systematization, and the system of van Helmont, while far less orderly, also had its own basic principles on which all else depended. Boyle, however, practiced medicine on a thoroughly different basis. He did not depend on system or logic.
His basic anti-Aristotelianism prevented his appreciating the biologically oriented thought of Aristotle. Instead, Boyle talked about the inorganic world, of water, of metals and elements, of physical properties. He ignored that inner drive which Spinoza called the conatus; or the seeds of Paracelsus or van Helmont; or the persistence over a time course of any "essence" or "form."
Roger Bacon foresaw several of our great discoveries; Cardan, the differential calculus; Van Helmont, chemistry; and it has been possible to write a book on the forerunners of Darwin. We talk so much of the free flight of imagination, of the all-comprehensive power of the creator, that we forget the sociological conditions not to mention others on which they are every moment dependent.
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