Essay review: The ferment of Van Helmont's ideas

Abstract

In Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer o f Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Walter Pagel professes themes central to his life-long endeavors as one of this century's most distinguished historians of medicine. From his early works such as "Religious Motives in the Medical Biology of the 17th Century," through books and monographs on Van Helmont, Paracelsus, and Harvey, to this latest contribution, Pagel has emphasized the centrality of esoteric modes of thought to the development of Renaissance and early modern medicine and biology. Out of the ferment of such discarded views, Pagel insists, emerge fundamental biological notions like those of immanently active matter and "irritability" and so-called ontological conceptions of disease. Moreover, throughout his career Pagel has been sensitive to nuances of the religious and philosophical commitments underlying such views. Pagel's book successfully elucidates the full range of Van Helmont's biological, medical, and natural philosophical ideas, at the same time exposing their roots in religious and philosophical reform. Van Helmont's reforming impulses, unlike more moderate "humanist" medical reformers such as Champier and Fernel in the preceding century, were based upon neither the revival of ancient medical authorities nor the purification and continued hegemony of established institutions such as the university medical faculty. Like his primary sixteenth-century model, Paracelsus, Van Helmont stood largely outside the edifice of medical thought built upon these twin foundations by traditional academic physicians of the Renaissance. Like Paracelsus, Van Helmont sought to undermine the edifice. As the construction of human reason, traditional Aristotelian and Galenic biomedical thought was specious and misguided, substituting fictitious entia rationis for things themselves. For Van Helmont, reform had to recognize the absolute disjunction between reason and truth. The products of human reason, the result of "impatient ambition and vanity," are opposed to the human intellect (mens) which reason attempts to subvert. Turning from the fabrications of reason specious