Immaginazione e malattia

The Fleming Jan Baptiste Van Helmont (1579-1648) is generally acknowledged as one of the main medical exponents of the Baroque era. He is particularly known for having coined the term gas, a major advancement in chemistry, then emerging as one of the basic tenets of medicine. Interested in various areas of knowledge, he obtained a medical degree at Louvain, but preferred to devote himself, single-handed, to the study of "natural magic"--a catchphrase for an [End Page 567] assortment of mystical, Neoplatonic, occult, and popular notions, along Paracelsian lines. Confronted with this complex and abstruse situation, the historiography on Van Helmont has been limited to the chemical implications of his philosophy of medicine. Even the monograph by the distinguished medical historian Walter Pagel (Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine, 1982) tends to highlight his pivotal chemical views

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