An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579–1644), by Georgiana D. Hedesan

Abstract

Jan Baptist van Helmont was perhaps the only successor to the medical reformer Paracelsus who developed a sufficiently distinct iatrochemistry to be remembered in his own right. The designation ‘Helmontian’ is almost as common as ‘Paracelsian’ among historians of early modern science and medicine. For a while, mostly in the second half of the seventeenth century, Van Helmont was recognised as an important thinker, and he engaged the attention of a number of prominent contemporaries. In spite of this historical importance, however, he has not attracted detailed scholarly attention. Although mentioned frequently in passing, or even at greater length, in secondary works on the history of early modern natural philosophy, chemistry and medicine, Van Helmont has only once received book-length treatment in English, prior to the appearance of this new monograph by Georgiana D. Hedesan. Accordingly, this second book on Van Helmont will henceforth be an obvious starting point for all those seeking to understand the baffling complexities of this Flemish iatrochemist. Divided into two parts, the first, ‘Van Helmont in Context’, is the most useful. Here the reader is provided with a sketch of the historical background to Van Helmont’s work in medical alchemy, including discussions of Paracelsus, and some of his leading followers: Petrus Severinus, Joseph Du Chesne and Oswald Croll. This is followed by as full a biography of Van Helmont as is possible. It concludes with a very useful account of the nature of Van Helmont’s major work, the Ortus medicina, which is revealed here to be a collection of unfinished, or poorly developed, works compiled after his death by his son from highly disordered papers. This in itself helps to explain the frustratingly incoherent nature of Van Helmont’s work. Although acknowledging that a proper edition of his manuscript remains ‘would have been a huge task’, Hedesan does not consider the distinct possibility that making sense of his papers would have been an impossible undertaking for the principal reason that they do not make any sense. In spite of a historically fleeting reputation as a great thinker, Van Helmont seems to have been one of those, like Giordano Bruno or Paracelsus, whose reputations are not based on the undeniable power and fruitfulness of their ideas, and their revelatory insights, but on a complex nexus of accidental historical factors.