Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/444

 *ments made by both Hirsch and Dezeimeris to the effect that Van Helmont, in matters relating to physiology and pathology, was unquestionably a precise and critical observer, a sound thinker, and a correct interpreter; but the plan of the present work will not permit me to enter into all these details. I can only quote a few of the teachings or sayings to which Hirsch refers:—

Digestion does not, as Galen maintains, depend upon heat, but upon a certain ferment existing in the gastric juice.

Heat is not, as has hitherto been taught, the cause of life, but rather one of its products.

The final cause of the sensory phenomena of life is the ''archaeus influus'', which, while it is inseparably united with matter, nevertheless does not represent the soul itself, but rather the organ of the soul, and is seated in the "duumvirate" of the spleen and the stomach.

Disease, in order to acquire sufficient power to antagonize life effectively, must unite its forces with the archaeus influus.

It is claimed that Van Helmont, more than any other teacher of medicine, was instrumental in giving the death-*blow to the practice—which prevailed in all the medical schools of that day—of teaching the obsolescent Galenic doctrines, and that for this valuable service alone he deserves full recognition at the hands of the medical profession of to-day. But, as we learn from Ernest von Meyer's history of chemistry, Van Helmont has a much stronger claim for recognition in the fact that he made many important contributions to iatrochemistry and also to fundamental or pure chemistry. Taking one thing with another, says von Meyer, we may safely assert that Van Helmont's useful contributions to the medical and chemical sciences by far outweigh those which are of a fantastic or useless nature. It was he, for example, who materially increased our knowledge of the nature of carbonic acid. He demonstrated how it may be extracted from limestone or from potash by the aid of acids, from burning coal, and from wine and beer while they are undergoing fermentation. He also showed that it is present in the stomach, in various