Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/443

 however, to receive this honor at that time, feeling that he had not acquired sufficient knowledge to justify such acceptance; and from that date forward he turned his attention to the study of other branches of learning. Finally, in 1599, he accepted from the same university the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and soon afterward left Belgium with a large party of his friends to make an extensive tour through the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy. After his return home in 1602 he devoted his attention chiefly to chemical researches; but in a very short time he started off again on a journey to Spain and France, and eventually to England, where he spent nearly a year in the city of London, returning to Belgium in 1605. He married, about this time, a rich heiress of Wilworde, in the neighborhood of Brussels, and resumed with great zest his labors in chemistry and alchemy. He was thus enabled to manufacture many remarkable remedies with which—as he himself declared—he succeeded in curing myriads of patients who had failed to receive any benefit whatever from the ordinary resources of medical science. He died on December 30, 1644.

I do not feel equal to the task of expounding Van Helmont's often very obscure theories regarding the physical and psychological processes that take place in the human being; regarding the distinctions which he makes between the "archaeus influus"—the regulating principle which governs all the psychical and physiological processes in the body—and the "archaeus insitus"—the subsidiary power which resides in each individual part of the body, but which at the same time is under the control of the "archaeus influus"; and regarding the doctrine that disease is the result of an "idea morbosa" of the "archaeus influus." August Hirsch says that in developing these theories Van Helmont puts forward many bright ideas, which unfortunately lead one into a wilderness of fantastic, theosophic concepts. If sufficient time and space were at my command it might be interesting to separate some of these bright thoughts from the extravagances in which they are buried, and thus demonstrate the truth of the state