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Updated: June 6, 2025
In what follows pains are taken to present the facts in the form in which one comes to know them through van Helmont's own account, given in his Ortus Medicinae. For reasons which need not be described here, van Helmont studied with particular interest the various modifications in which carbon is capable of occurring in nature among them carbon's combustion product, carbon dioxide.
What if there be one certain means of recruiting that principle; and what if that secret can be discovered?" "Pshaw! The old illusion of the mediaeval empirics." "Not so. But the mediaeval empirics were great discoverers. You sneer at Van Helmont, who sought, in water, the principle of all things; but Van Helmont discovered in his search those invisible bodies called gases.
Van Helmont, of all the mediaeval mystics, is, in spite of his many extravagant whims, the one whose intellect is the most suggestive to the disciplined reasoners of our day.
"Von Helmont, in the same pursuit, discovered the properties of gas," says Mackay; "Geber made discoveries in chemistry, which were equally important; and Paracelsus, amid his perpetual visions of the transmutation of metals, found that mercury was a remedy for one of the most odious and excruciating of all the diseases that afflict humanity." As we shall see a little farther on, alchemy finally evolved into modern chemistry, but not until it had passed through several important transitional stages.
Thus they supposed a malignity which caused all diseases, as well inflammatory as other fevers, and which was to be forced out of the body by sweating, with their hot therapeutics; they, therefore, attacked all fevers with this chemical ammunition, and attempted to carry them with fire and storm, prescribing the praecipitatus diaphoreticus and sweating regimen, which must have been fatal to many, and no doubt would have been so to many more, if van Helmont had not allowed his patients to dilute the medicine with a thin diet, which rendered the calorific method less fatal.
After all, above the liquid state of matter there was another state, less dense than water and yet presenting itself through more or less clearly distinguishable space-bound objects, such as the mists arising from and spreading over ponds and meadows, and the clouds hovering in the sky. For this state of matter the term 'vapour' had become customary, and it was used by van Helmont in this sense.
He was an opponent of the Oxford scholasticism and inclined towards a school of thought represented by Robert Fludd, the two Vaughans, Henry More, and Van Helmont, men who had drunk deeply of the cabalistic writers, disciples of Paracelsus and Pico della Mirandola.
Nor shall I expatiate on the alkahest of that mad scoundrel, Paracelsus, with which he pretended to reduce flints into salt; nor archaeus or spiritus rector of that visionary Van Helmont, his simple, elementary water, his gas, ferments, and transmutations; nor shall I enlarge upon the salt, sulphur, and oil, the acidum vagum, the mercury of metals, and the volatilised vitriol of other modern chemists, a pack of ignorant, conceited, knavish rascals, that puzzle your weak heads with such jargon, just as a Germanised m r throws dust in your eyes, by lugging in and ringing the changes on the balance of power, the Protestant religion, and your allies on the continent; acting like the juggler, who picks your pockets while he dazzles your eyes and amuses your fancy with twirling his fingers and reciting the gibberish of hocus pocus; for, in fact, the balance of power is a mere chimera.
Van Helmont, in particular, published a work on the effects of magnetism on the human frame; and Balthazar Gracian, a Spaniard, rendered himself famous for the boldness of his views on the subject. "The magnet," said the latter, "attracts iron; iron is found everywhere; everything, therefore, is under the influence of magnetism.
The "Capsula" entitled "Nishmath Chajim" was printed in 1722, at New London, and is in the possession of our own Society. He means, by these words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the "Vicar of Wakefield."
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