Joan baptista van helmont biography

He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry , and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry ". Jan Baptist van Helmont was the youngest of five children of Maria van Stassaert and Christiaen van Helmont, a public prosecutor and Brussels council member, who had married in the Sint-Goedele church in He interrupted his studies, and for a few years he traveled through Switzerland , Italy , France , Germany , and England.

Returning to his own country, van Helmont obtained a medical degree in The same year he married Margaret van Ranst, who was of a wealthy noble family. Van Helmont and Margaret lived in Vilvoorde , near Brussels, and had six or seven children. Van Helmont was a disciple of the mystic and alchemist , Paracelsus , though he scornfully repudiated the errors of most contemporary authorities, including Paracelsus.

On the other hand, he engaged in the new learning based on experimentation that was producing men like Santorio Santori , William Harvey , Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon. Van Helmont was a careful observer of nature ; his analysis of data gathered in his experiments suggests that he had a concept of the conservation of mass. He was an early experimenter in seeking to determine how plants gain mass.

For Van Helmont, air and water were the two primitive elements.

When did jan baptista van helmont discover photosynthesis

Fire he explicitly denied to be an element , and earth is not one because it can be reduced to water. Van Helmont is regarded as the founder of pneumatic chemistry , [ 3 ] as he was the first to understand that there are gases distinct in kind from atmospheric air and furthermore invented the word " gas ". He perceived that his "gas sylvestre" carbon dioxide given off by burning charcoal, was the same as that produced by fermenting must , a gas which sometimes renders the air of caves unbreathable.

Van Helmont wrote extensively on the subject of digestion.