Helmont

[hel-mont, hel-mawnt]

noun

1. Jan Baptista van 1579–1644, Flemish chemist and physician.

Helmont

/ ˈhɛlmɔnt /

noun

1. Jean Baptiste van (ʒɑ̃ batist vɑn). 1577–1644, Flemish chemist and physician. He was the first to distinguish gases and claimed to have coined the word gas

Example Sentences

Van Helmont, it is worth remarking, provoked the fury of the Jesuits, his co-religionists, by suggesting that the skull of a Jesuit would be ideal—he was hostile to the Jesuits because they had little difficulty persuading people to believe in their miracles, while his own scientific facts were met with scepticism.

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The Sceptical Chymist and the Physiological Essays were works heavily influenced by van Helmont; it took a while for this new terminology to cross over from the topics discussed by the followers of Paracelsus, the iatro-chemists, into those discussed by the mathematicians.

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Hobbes was left out of the Royal Society—there is an extended literature on why—but Digby, Charleton and Boyle, all readers of van Helmont, were among the first members.

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Van Helmont, Charleton and Digby argued that this was no bar to an effective cure; they wanted to redescribe the weapon salve as ‘magnetical’ because the magnet provides a paradigm case of action over a distance.

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By 1654 Charleton, whom we earlier met translating van Helmont, had become one of the insolent sceptics.

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