Laura Sumrall a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Science in Fulfillment

Home , John Webster (minister), Martin Delrio

A STRANGE GUEST:

THE DEMONOLOGICAL FRAMING OF THE PATHOLOGICAL

IN HELMONTIAN MEDICINE

Laura Sumrall

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Science in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in History and Philosophy of Science

The University of Sydney

September 2020

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... iv ABSTRACT ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Histories ...... 3 Present Purposes ...... 6 Descriptive Outline ...... 6

PART I: DEMONS ...... 8 CHAPTER 1: THE REGURGITATED KNIFE: DEMONIC POWER AND THE BOUNDARIES OF NATURE ...... 9 I: Incredible Illness ...... 12 II: The Demon’s Domain ...... 19 III: Medicine Made Manifest ...... 25 IV: Recourse to the Devil ...... 29 CHAPTER 2: POWERS OF HEALING AND HARMING: A THEORY OF MAGIC ...... 32 I: The Power of the Witch ...... 36 II: The Power of Imagination ...... 39 III: The Power of the Devil ...... 43 IV: The Power of Medicine ...... 47 V: The Ends and Means of Magic ...... 50 VI: Powers of Healing and Harming ...... 54

PART II: DISEASES ...... 56 CHAPTER 3: A STRANGE GUEST: THE DEMONOLOGICAL FRAMING OF DISEASE ...... 57 I: Disease Is ...... 58 II: The Seed ...... 59 III: The Ferment ...... 63 IV: The Archeus ...... 65 V: Creating Disease ...... 68 VI: Classifying Disease ...... 71 ii

VII: Wounds and Tempests ...... 76 VIII: Foreign Yet Familiar ...... 81 IX: A Strange Guest ...... 84

PART III: DEPARTURES ...... 87 CHAPTER 4: UNNATURAL BODIES: THE HELMONTIAN CRITIQUE OF ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATION ...... 88 I: A True Disciple of Helmont ...... 93 II: The Plague Anatomized ...... 99 III: Natural Bodies, Unnatural Diseases ...... 107 IV: A New Anatomy ...... 112 V: Pyrotechny Asserted ...... 117 CHAPTER 5: THE SPOOR OF DISEASE: VENATIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND UNIVERSAL MEDICINE ...... 122 I: The Liquor Alkahest ...... 123 II: On Dropsy: Thomas Sydenham ...... 129 III: On Dropsy: Van Helmont ...... 136 IV: Curing Generally ...... 142 V: Perfecting Knowledge ...... 145 VI: Dispossessing the Demon ...... 148

CONCLUSION ...... 150

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 152

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am foremost indebted to my supervisor, Ofer Gal, for spending years sharing his experience and expertise in the History and Philosophy of Science, in the process never declining to read last- minute drafts, to share coffee and conversation, or to offer advice. I would not be the historian I am – or perhaps an historian at all – without his longsuffering guidance.

I count myself lucky to have found my way to the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, where I have been since beginning my postgraduate study. My particular thanks go to Debbie Castle and Daniela Helbig for their advice and support. I also had the fortune to spend time researching at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and at Brown University, where I learned from impressive scholars how to be more scholarly myself. Among these scholars, I would like to thank Harold Cook, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong in particular for their generosity. I would be remiss not to also acknowledge the people without whom I would have never embarked on an academic career (emphasizing that I accept all blame for this decision myself): Michael Farmer, Mark Clark, and Kelly Sellers.

Seven years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to Australia, where I intended to live and study for only two years. It would be impossible to acknowledge every debt I’ve accrued since then, to the many people who have made foreign places familiar to me. That said, it would have been impossible to complete this thesis – however imperfect – without the support of my fellow postgraduates at Sydney and elsewhere, whom I have the privilege of calling friends. Among them: Chris Hesselbein, Paddy Holt, Claire Kennedy, Ian Lawson, Sam Lewin, James Ley, Eamon Little, Nicolas Michel, Alex Pereira, and Sahar Tavakoli.

Finally (and particularly for my mother’s peace of mind) I leave an assurance originally penned by Eliza Butler:

There are others who might be mentioned; but it will be abundantly clear to my readers that, although this volume sprang from a Faustian impulse (the desire for more knowledge than I could attain to), I have not invoked the devil’s aid and need tender no thanks to him.

Así fui revelando los años, así fui entrando en posesión de lo que ya era mío. Jorge Luis Borges iv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Portrait of Andreas Grünheide, the Prussian knife-swallower ...... 16

Figure 2: Margaret’s Knife ...... 19

Figure 3: The Phalanx of Diseases ...... 74

Figure 4: An Advertisement from the Society of Chymical Physitians ...... 91

Figure 5: Loimotomia ...... 100

ABSTRACT

In 1630, the faculty of theology at the University of Louvain condemned the work of the Flemish physician Jan Baptista van Helmont (d.1644), concluding that, in his natural philosophy, “the activity of God, nature, and the devil cannot be distinguished.” Van Helmont’s divisive medical perspective was rooted in the natural magic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through which he sought to expand the purview of human efficacy in the natural world by redefining the limitations of both. Central to his challenge to established medicine was his reorientation of medicine to the essential knowledge and cure of diseases; in the process, van Helmont produced a concept of disease as a truly existing ens both dependent upon and unnatural to human nature. This, I argue, was originally a demonological insight. In debates over medical authority and disease etiology, van Helmont turned to an intellectual consideration of demonic power in which he delineated the natural through the unnatural, forming a concept of the pathological that framed his theory of disease. Self-proclaimed Helmontian physicians who later took up van Helmont’s theory of disease therefore inherited a concept of the pathological originally formulated in answer to questions concerning demonic power and the boundaries of natural action. This thesis explores the participation of esoteric knowledge in early modern scientific development through the works of van Helmont and his English followers, whose practices were shaped by his medical perspective even as they divested his corpus of the demonology with which he originally justified his medical reform.

INTRODUCTION

In 1968, Georges Canguilhem stated that the history of science[s] is “an effort to enquire into and give an understanding of the extent to which outmoded notions or attitudes or methods were, in their time, successful; and consequently of the respect in which the outmoded past remains the past of an activity for which it is necessary to retain the term ‘scientific.’”1 But what precisely are these scientific objects, and how to do they differ from the objects of science? In the intervening decades, attempts to square the “relation of knowledge to its object” in the history of science has problematized these objects qua ‘scientific.’2 This has led to a proposed shift from the history of science to a more broadly construed history of knowledge. In the inaugural issue of a recent journal established with just such a project in mind, Lorraine Daston described historians of science as “caught in a hall of mirrors” when faced with the question of what the objects of our discipline precisely are.3 While the history of knowledge threatens to expand the borders of the history of science beyond the capacity for discourse, there are many worthwhile concerns to address as a historian whose work takes as its object a suite of theories and practices that obtain a valuation in relation to the scientific. It is just such valuation of scientific knowledge that suggests the importance of historicizing its development and thereby historicizing scientific knowledge and practices in the present moment.

For historians of early modern science – and particular for those interested in the body in the grip of disease – the difficulty posed in producing a precise demarcation of these objects of study arises from both the inchoate status of the scientific in the early modern period and the temporal distance that inescapably renders the past a foreign territory, however familiar it may appear.4 In seventeenth-century Europe, ‘scientific’ knowledge is most closely identifiable with

1 Georges Canguilhem, “L’objet de l’histoire des sciences,” in Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: J. Vrin, 1968), p. 14: “L’histoire des sciences ce n’est pas le progrès des sciences renversé, c’est-à-dire la mise en perspective d’étapes dépassées dont la vérité d’aujourd’hui serait le point de fuite. Elle est un effort pour rechercher et faire comprendre dans quelle mesure des notions ou des attitudes ou des méthodes dépassées ont été, à leur époque, dépassement et par conséquent en quoi le passé dépassé reste le passé d’une activité à laquelle il faut conserver le nom de scientifique.” English trans. by Mary Tiles from the 5th ed. (1983), reprinted in Continental Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting (Blackwell, 2005), pp. 198-207, at p. 201. 2 Canguilhem, “The Object of the History of Sciences,” p. 202. Cf. Peter Dear, “Science Is Dead; Long Live Science,” Osiris 27 (2012): 37-55. 3 Lorraine Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” Know 1, no. 1 (2017): 131-154, at p. 131. 4 For instance Carlo Ginzburg has noted that the process of interpreting historical texts entails the danger of “assuming the transparency of the actors” under study and thus the danger of “[ascribing] to them our 1 natural philosophical knowledge, and this knowledge took shape in multifarious and contested theories and practices that were negotiated within shifting relations both social and intellectual. The boundaries placed around the natural world and what constituted natural philosophical knowledge (as well as how to obtain it) were fluid, and the ontologies drawn upon to negotiate these boundaries were not our ontologies. Within this world, the shapes of rationality may seem monstrous to modern sensibilities. They are nevertheless rational.

The philosophical works of Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579/80 – 1644) may be seen, in Canguilhem’s estimation, as the ‘outmoded scientific.’ He was a physician who was born to landed gentry in the low countries, where he obtained his medical doctorate in 1599.5 Van Helmont’s concerns as a physician cannot be divorced from medical practices – the processes of diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and prophylaxis that his medical theory was structured to serve and in which its philosophical conclusions were expressed. This relation between theory and practice makes medical history a peculiar one for the historian of science, for conclusions drawn in medical philosophies are consciously brought to bear on the realities of human experience within the natural world and with one another as well as, in particular, the embodied experience of health and illness. In seeking to understand disease and how to cure it, van Helmont constructed a medical philosophy in which an inextricable mixture of spiritual and material causation accounted for perceptible phenomena both internal and external to the human body. These fluid causalities gave free interchange to body and spirit – and to spirits, which might seek to act on human bodies for malevolent purposes.

The uncertain status of the boundaries of nature in early modern discourse and the tensions between the foreign and the familiar that accompany it are motivating factors in why I have chosen to present this work as a work within the history of science. Broadly speaking, that means this work aims to discern and explicate the philosophical content of van Helmont’s works that engage with human knowledge of and efficacy within the natural world. This requires that van Helmont’s philosophy be taken seriously as a coherent account of reality in his time. Any serious consideration of van Helmont’s philosophical works necessitates that the history of

language and our categories” – historians, he writes, can fall into the trap of mistaking the foreign for the familiar, believing that they have “become the intimates of the characters they are dealing with.” See: “Our Words, and Theirs: A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today,” in Historical Knowledge. In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, eds. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Reprinted in Cromohs 18 (2014): 97-114, at p. 98. 5 Many biographical sketches exist of van Helmont, but for a classic one see Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1- 17.

2 medicine be expanded to include topics in the history of magic, alchemy (henceforth “chymistry”), and religion – all of which converge in his construction of the natural world.6 Can demonology be considered part of the history of science? I argue that it must be, because the natural philosophy of van Helmont is part of this history.

Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Histories

Within van Helmont’s collected works – his Ortus medicinae – is a persistent aim at explicating the extent of human power to effect change in the natural world.7 Medicine oriented his natural philosophy to the confrontation between physicians and the illnesses of their patients, and he consistently presented his medical reform as an answer to the inefficacy of learned medicine as he was taught it at the University of Louvain, in the last decade of the sixteenth century. As is well- documented, van Helmont turned from scholastic humoral medicine and its pagan source texts to join the growing movement of chymical medicine widely associated with the works of the iconoclastic Germanic physician Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus.8 Paracelsus’ chymical philosophy and the chymical practices upon which it was predicated focused medical practice more intensely on laboratory work and patient-physician interaction, while countering the pagan medical tradition with natural philosophical interpretations of scripture. Van

6 In using “chymistry,” I have taken up the terminology suggested by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe to indicate the fluid status of alchemy and chemistry in early modern Europe. See: “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 1 (1998): 32-65, and “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 385–431. 7 Most of van Helmont’s treatises were published posthumously in the collection edited by his son: Ortus Medicinae: Id Est Initia Phisicae Inaudita: Progressus Medicinae Novus in Morborum Ultionem Ad Vitam Longam, ed. by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (Amsterdam: apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1648). This printing includes a reprint of his disease treatises published in 1644: Opuscula Medica Inaudita. I. De Lithiasi. II. De Febribus. III. De Humoribus Galeni. IV. De Peste. (Cologne: apud Jodocum Kalcoven, 1644). Along with his first printed treatise from 1621 (Disputatio de magnetica vulnerum naturali et legitima curatione, contra R. P. Joannem Roberti (Paris: Victor Leroy, 1621), these texts constitute the works of van Helmont that I use in my analysis. For a useful bibliography of van Helmont’s works indicating their editions and translations, see: Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 209-214. See also, on the translation and circulation of van Helmont’s works: Sietske Fransen, “Exchange of Knowledge Through Translation: Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Editors and Translators in the Seventeenth Century” (PhD Thesis: The Warburg Institute and University of London, 2014). 8 Of the many works on Paracelsus, recommended studies include: Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: S. Karger, 1958); Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Owsei Tempkin, “The Elusiveness of Paracelsus,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (1952): 201-17.

Helmont, a devout Catholic and invested chymist, built his medical philosophy on these foundations

Due to the circumstances of its publication, the Ortus medicinae is vast, meandering, often abstruse, and in general in possession of all the marks of a work compiled from the notes of a writer still in the process of developing his ideas. Within this work, it is not always clear how to draw from the text a coherent system of the world, which van Helmont had not yet managed to complete at the time of his death in 1644. Focusing on his concept of disease provides some advantages in addressing these textual complications, but it is only one approach to a corpus that has received scholarly attention as rich and varied as the works themselves. The foundational work of modern scholarship in English on the natural philosophy of van Helmont is that of Walter Pagel, whose Joan Baptista van Helmont was printed in 1982. Pagel’s work is exhaustive but largely descriptive and self-contained, presenting a portrait of van Helmont as his theories, while also indicating what he perceived to be an incongruity between the ‘scientific’ and ‘mystical’ content of van Helmont’s works.

While Pagel’s work remains a useful resource on van Helmont’s natural philosophy, his historical framing of van Helmont has been greatly nuanced by more recent scholarship. Scholarship on van Helmont has grown exponentially since the turn of the twenty-first century, alongside a growing academic interest in the history of magic and the history of alchemy, for which van Helmont’s works are clearly relevant. This includes the works of William Newman, Lawrence Principe, and – looking more specifically at van Helmont’s matter theory – Antonio Clericuzio, who provide chymical exposition of van Helmont’s matter theory.9 However, these works tend to treat van Helmont as a chymist to the neglect of his status as a physician, for whom chymistry was a means of addressing disease. Focusing on a different face of van Helmont’s philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan’s recent monograph provides an invaluable study of van Helmont’s philosophy as a Christian one, firmly locating the ‘mystical’ features of his work, which may have in the past been regarded as merely peripheral to an otherwise scientific corpus, at the foundation of his philosophy.10 This study, however, does not consider van Helmont’s philosophical elaboration of demonic power.

9 E.g.: William Newman and Lawrence Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Antonio Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle. A Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeeth- Century England,” British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 90 (1993). 10 Georgiana Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge: The ‘Christian Philosophy’ of Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579-1644) (London; New York: Routledge, 2016).

In a different vein, Sietske Fransen has recently completed an important dissertation on the translation of van Helmont’s works.11 This dissertation has provided a much-needed situating of van Helmont and his son in the historical context in which they both lived and wrote, while also casting light on what the efforts of translators (and van Helmont’s own works in Dutch and Latin) reveal about the construction of his texts and the forms in which they were circulated. Of particular relevance to the present work is that of Guido Giglioni, who has treated van Helmont’s theory of disease in light of the physical and spiritual processes crucial to its relation to the demon, without yet marking this relation.12

Because the present work considers demonology within the history of science, it is also situated in relation to the vast and rich literature on histories of demonology and magic. Numerous recent studies on both natural magic and its obverse – demonic power – have worked to situate the demon in the early modern world’s social and philosophical landscape.13 Demonology as a medical concern is a less thoroughly explored perspective, but the histories relevant to the constructing of the demon’s ontology are inextricable from this ontology’s medical positioning. I bring these considerations of demonology within natural philosophy to bear to on the works of van Helmont in order to cast light on his conceptualization of disease. The relation between demonology and disease revealed by this study, in turn, holds consequence for understanding the complex contingencies at work in the history of science – and for recognizing the distorted picture that emerges when such contingencies are excluded from this history.

11 Fransen, “Exchange of Knowledge Through Translation: Jan Baptista van Helmont and His Editors and Translators in the Seventeenth Century.” 12 Guido Giglioni, “The Language of Imagination in Jan Baptiste Van Helmont and Francis Glisson,” in Medical Latin from the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Wouter Brack and Herwig Deumens. (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België, 2000). Giglioni has also written the most significant contribution to the study of van Helmont’s disease theory: Guido Giglioni, Immaginazione et Maladie (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2000). 13 One of the most significant works on the status of the demon in early modern natural philosophy is that of Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Among other studies on demonology, I draw on recent work on the epistemology of the demonic, e.g.: Michelle D. Brock and David R. Winter (eds.), Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Cham: Palgrave, 2018). I also rely on scholarship that reveals the foundations of early modern demonology – and early modern magic – in the preceding centuries, e.g.: Frank F. Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2013), and Maaike van der Lugt, “‘Abominable Mixtures’: The Liber vaccae in the Medieval West, or The Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic,” Traditio 64 (2009): 229-277.

Present Purposes

Canguilhem wrote that “The object of the historian of sciences can only be delimited by a decision which assigns it its interest and importance.”14 Casting an eye on the demon in van Helmont’s natural philosophy is important both for understanding the philosophical works that he left to later generations of physicians, as well as for understanding the historical contingencies of scientific knowledge, which has been shaped by ontologies now remote from the scientific. By focusing on van Helmont’s demonological speculations as natural philosophy, I demonstrate that his ontology of the demon is inextricable from his philosophy of nature and necessary for understanding his legacy. When it becomes clear that this ontology is shared with disease, it too becomes clear that his demonology participated in the shaping of medicine as practiced not only by van Helmont but also by the readers who took up his medical philosophy. Mastery of disease entailed a certain mastering of nature, for which van Helmont first had to master the demon. In the relation between the foreign and the familiar – and the unnatural and the natural – van Helmont thus articulated one of the most significant novelties of his medical philosophy: a concept of the pathological that encompasses both demonic and morbific power over the human body. This concept of the pathological – its construction and its consequence – is the subject of the present work.

Descriptive Outline

This thesis is divided into five chapters across three parts. The first part contains two chapters on van Helmont’s demonology; the second contains one chapter on his theory of disease; and the third contains two chapters on the transformations of this theory in the works of English Helmontians. This structure reflects the aim of this thesis in explicating the relation between the demonic and the morbific in van Helmont’s works and in demonstrating how this demonological framework continued to shape the medical practices of later physicians.

In Chapter 1, I begin by considering the delineation and contestation of the boundaries of nature. Looking specifically as an extraordinary symptom of demonic illness – the expulsion of strange objects – I trace the efforts of both theologians and physicians to provide naturalistic explanation for this expression of demonic power, demonstrating how they did so with distinct aims in mind. For van Helmont, this naturalization of demonic illness was an attempt to expand medical authority through the redefining of the boundaries of nature. In doing so, controversially

14 Canguilhem, “The Object of the History of the Sciences,” p. 203; Canguilhem, “L’objet de l’histoire des sciences,” p. 18: “L’objet de l’historien des sciences ne peut être délimité que par une décision qui lui assigne son intérêt et son importance.”

6 blurred the lines between natural, divine, and demonic action in his determination to expand the purview of the physician to include processes previously assigned to the demonic.

The question concerning demonic power is carried into Chapter 2, in which I turn to van Helmont’s naturalization of magical efficacy more broadly speaking. In this chapter I demonstrate that van Helmont turns to magical powers of harming in order to argue for the legitimation of magical powers of healing, ultimately assigning them a common source of magical efficacy. This simultaneous consideration of powers of healing and powers of harming collapsed the boundary between illicit and tolerated magic that had been drawn on the basis of their means in favor of the magician.

In Chapter 3, which constitutes Part II, I bring van Helmont’s demonological speculations to bear on his theory of disease, demonstrating the many ways in which his ontology of disease participates in features of the demonic. The relation that van Helmont describes between disease and the body as one existing between the foreign and familiar reveals a concept of the pathological that encompasses both demonic and morbific power over the human body.

In the final two chapters, I turn from van Helmont to readers of van Helmont in order to explore the ways in which his concept of the pathological shaped the medical practices of his followers. Chapter 4 focuses on the Helmontian critique of anatomy as articulated by the English physician George Thomson, who dissected a pestilential corpse during the 1665 outbreak of the plague in London. This chapter demonstrates the ways in which Thomson’s seemingly paradoxical critique of the epistemic power of anatomical investigation is drawn from van Helmont, whose works and reputation were mobilized by Thomson in his self-fashioning as a physician opposed to established institutions of medicine.

In Chapter 5, I close by considering the ambitions of van Helmont’s medicine and his medical epistemology by focusing on the Helmontian physician George Starkey, who spent most of his life attempting to synthesize a universal medicine described in van Helmont’s works. Starkey’s deference to van Helmont’s textual authority in his pursuit of a universal medicine reveals how van Helmont’s works were read as an injunction to exercise near-limitless power over nature in the quest to cure disease. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the ambition to comprehensively cure disease – and comprehensively know nature – that van Helmont’s theory of disease justified and how this ambition was taken up by later physicians. In doing so, it demonstrates how his theory of disease, which was originally justified in demonological terms, outlived the demonological debates in which it was framed and went on to shape medical practices by shaping the aims and approaches of medical practitioners.

PART I | DEMONS

… las cosas del mundo todas se han de mirar al rebés para verlas al derecho. Baltasar Gracián

CHAPTER 1 | THE REGURGITATED KNIFE: DEMONIC POWER AND THE BOUNDARIES OF

NATURE

In October of 1630, all seven professors of theology at the University of Louvain affixed their signatures to a list of censures condemning van Helmont’s work. This was only the latest addition to a growing controversy sparked by a manuscript that van Helmont wrote in 1617, De magnetica vulnerum curatione.1 Van Helmont’s aim in writing De magnetica was to provide philosophical justification for the legitimate use of a medicine known as the weapon salve – an ointment said to be capable of healing an injury from a distance once applied to the weapon that caused it.2 The weapon salve was a topic of heated debate in van Helmont’s lifetime, when its widely recognized efficacy demanded explanation in view of its operation. Often, such explanations appealed to demonic power, thus ranking the weapon salve among illicit remedies regardless of its beneficial effects. In his enthusiasm to attribute to natural processes the capacity of this ointment to operate from a distance, van Helmont trod well beyond the acceptable boundaries of his profession and into bold speculation. He not only insisted that the effects of the weapon salve had been erroneously attributed to demonic power; he argued, in fact, that all supposed demonic effects had been erroneously placed beyond the boundaries of nature, which improperly conflated the demonic with the supernatural. Louvain’s theologians were not convinced; indeed, they concluded

Note: An earlier, abbreviated version of this chapter has been published: Laura Sumrall, “The Regurgitated Knife: Demonic Power and the Boundaries of Nature in Early Modern Medicine,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49, no. 3 (2019): 589-607.

1 The treatise in question is: Jan Baptista van Helmont, Disputatio de magnetica vulnerum naturali et legitima curatione, contra R. P. Joannem Roberti (Paris: Victor Leroy, 1621), reprinted as “De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione” in his collected works: Ortus medicinae, ed. Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (Amsterdam: apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1648). The controversy I refer to here includes the dispute between van Helmont and the Jesuit theologian Jean Roberti that was catalyzed by the printing of van Helmont’s De magnetica in 1621 and that eventually evolved into an official inquiry carried out by the Spanish Inquisition, leading to his arrest in 1634. Notable among the many studies that discuss van Helmont’s trial is: Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2003), Chapter 5, which draws on both print and manuscript sources. 2 The weapon salve – and the role it played in van Helmont’s arrest – has received much attention from scholars. For an overview of the salve and a bibliography of relevant literature, see: Sietske Fransen, "Weapon Salve in the Renaissance," in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Springer International Publishing, 2018) at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4. For a more comprehensive history of the salve, see: Daniel Stolzenberg, "The Sympathetic Cure of Wounds: A Study of Magic, Nature and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Science" (Indiana University, 1998).

that, in van Helmont’s natural philosophy, “the activity of God, nature, and the devil cannot be distinguished.”3

In 1600, a year after van Helmont took his medical degree, the Jesuit theologian Martin Delrio published the final books of his Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex, an encyclopedic work on magic in which he meticulously delineated the very boundaries between the divine, the natural, and the demonic that van Helmont would deliberately trespass.4 Delrio, who taught an unimpressed van Helmont at Louvain, was contributing to a longstanding demonological discourse that physicians such as van Helmont often joined in the interest of their profession. Delrio and van Helmont were writing during the apogee of both learned magic and demonological polemics, when therapeutics such as the weapon salve were often condemned alongside heretical forms of magic understood to rely upon demonic power.5 The status of demonic spirits in the natural world and the extent of their power over human beings was contested, but the employment of demonic power – knowingly or otherwise – was unambiguously illicit. Part of ecclesiastical combat against such illicit magical practices relied on establishing the reality of the demonic power upon which they were said to rely. This involved firmly locating demonic activity in the natural world, while consequently distinguishing demonic power from supernatural power, which was preserved for the divine. But this naturalization of demonic power also complicated the status of medicine. Demonic afflictions were increasingly pervasive in the early modern period, and illnesses that were especially difficult to diagnose or were unresponsive to medical treatment were often taken to imply demonic agency. Meanwhile, treating demonic illness increasingly demanded the spiritual authority of ecclesiastical healers over the expertise of physicians, whose professional

3 Corneille Broeckx, “Notice sur le manuscrit Causa J. B. Helmontii, déposé aux Archives Archiépiscopales de Malines,” Annales de l’Académie d’archéologie de Belgique 9 (1852): 277–327, p. 303: “non possit Dei, naturae, diaboli operatio secerni.” 4 See: Martin Delrio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex; Quibus continetur acurata curiosarum artium, et vanarum superstitionum confutatio utilis Theologis, Iuris consultis, Medicis, Philologis (Lyon, 1608 [1551-1608]). On Delrio’s scholarship, see Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5 Magic and demonism already had a long-standing association in theology (and therefore law) by the sixteenth century. See: Edward Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 138-181 and esp. pp. 161-66, on the association between learned magic and witchcraft in the early modern period. The year 1600 is firmly within the period in which prosecution of witchcraft was most widespread; see Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 194. Cf. Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 187-218.

authority could not range beyond natural illness.6 As a result, negotiating the treatment of demonic illness required careful evaluation of the boundaries of nature and demonic power in order to determine the extent to which treatment could be wrested from ecclesiastical authority.

Many physicians, concerned to limit the over-hasty diagnosis of strange symptoms as demonic, began to explain such manifestations in terms of natural processes that either excluded demonic causation or that could be treated at least in part as natural illnesses in spite of having a demonic cause.7 One such physician mentioned by name in Delrio’s work is Johann Weyer (1515– 1588), a Dutch-born physician and for-a-time student of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535). In De praestigiis daemonum (1583 [1563]), Weyer makes his grievance clear:

First of all, when an illness surpassing the natural order manifests itself in an individual, recourse should be had … [to] a learned and experienced physician of strong moral sensibilities – because such rare and severe symptoms often arise in diseases that stem from natural causes but are immediately attributed to witchcraft by men of no scientific experience and little faith.8

Weyer was unwilling to defer to the demonic when the symptoms of an illness were unusual or their causes elusive. In De miraculis occultis naturae (1598 [1558]), the contemporary Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius (1505–1568) likewise provides many such natural explanations for symptoms that were taken to indicate demonic illness. Like Weyer and many others, he characterized the

6 Because my focus here is on the natural philosophical interpretation of demonic power, I use “demonic illness” broadly, to indicate psychological and somatic afflictions understood to be caused by demons acting with or without a human intermediary. The term “demon(s)” is used to indicate entities that are referred to variously as demons (daemones, cacodaemones), evil spirits (mali genii or spiritus), the devil or devils (diabolus, - i), or Satan (Satanas). Johann Weyer offers an annotated list of various terms used for demons at the time; see De praestigiis daemonum (Basil: Oporinus, 1583 [1563]), bk. 1, chap. 21, pp. 103–110. 7 The association between learned magic and illicit consort with demons is discussed in Chapter 2 of this thesis. It is generally accepted that the framing of learned magic as natural magic in early modern Europe was at least in part motivated by the need to distance learned magic from its illicit or otherwise illegitimate forms; I have previously defined natural magic in these terms: Laura Sumrall, "Natural Magic in Renaissance Science," in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Springer International Publishing, 2017) at 10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_956-1. I consistently use the term ‘symptom’ to indicate the signs and symptoms of demonic illness, not to deny that such symptoms were experienced (doubtless they were experienced), but to maintain within focus the fact that these categories were established and adjudicated by the professionals interpreting and treating such illnesses. 8 Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance: De praestigiis daemonum, ed. George Mora and Benjamin G. Kohl, trans. John Shea (Binghamton, N.Y: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 446–47. For the original Latin: De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 611–12: “Omnium uero primum, ubi malum aliquod praeter naturae ordinem in aliquo se prodit … confugiendum est … ad doctum exercitatumque bonae conscientiae medicum. Enimuero tam rara saepenumero et grauia in morbis suboriuntur symptomata, quae licet naturae impetu exoriantur, tamen ad maleficium mox referunt rerum imperiti atque exiguae fidei homines.”

demonic diagnosis as a refuge of ignorance.9 Both Weyer and Lemnius maintained that illnesses that were difficult to explain naturalistically did not necessarily exceed the boundaries of nature. Nevertheless, they ultimately conceded the limitations of medicine when demonic agency was strongly implied. The physician’s work ended, Weyer held, “when the evil [of the illness] surpasses natural limits.”10 With this boundary uncertain as it was absolute, the distinction between the domain of the physician and that of the priest opened itself to considerable debate. The negotiation of treatment that resulted established these disciplinary boundaries in the process of defining and delineating nature. It was in this context that physicians joined demonological discourse over the boundaries of nature in order to establish and expand medical authority through a naturalistic redefining of demonic power.

Incredible Illness

The role of public exorcism in post-Reformation religious propaganda ensured that the most characteristic symptoms of demonic illness were highly performative and distinctly contrary to daily experience.11 Among the characteristic symptoms of demonic possession in particular were physical convulsions and at least two symptoms reflecting cognitive phenomena: prognostication and xenoglossia (speaking in unlearned languages).12 If more than one symptom manifested in a

9 Levinus Lemnius, De miraculis occultis naturae, Libri IIII (Frankfurt, 1598 [1558]), p. 133: “Non desunt apud nos plerique qui cum sint in naturae operibus sobrie exercitati, ac morborum caussas, originem, progressus, quaeque comitantur symptomata seu accidentia ignorent, atque illorum rationem assequi nequeant, in malos infestosque Genios, qui nostris incommodis continenter inuigilant, haec ipsa referant.” Cf. The section below, “The Demon’s Domain,” and the discussion of occult properties. 10 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 447; De praestigiis daemonum, p. 612: “ubi naturae limites malum exuperare egredique” 11 I indicate demonic possession separately while treating it among demonic illness, because it connotates a distinct interaction between demons and the human body, that is, the supposition that the demon has entered the body. However, the capacity for a demon to do this was denied by both Weyer and van Helmont, and in the interrogation of demonic interaction with the body, such physicians made little distinction in seeking to submit effects associated with demonic agency to natural causes. See, e.g., Weyer, De praestigiis, p. 453: “Enimvero ut ne daemoni quidem licitum est, corpora aut hominum aut bestiarum ingredi pro sua libidine aut arbitrio: sic nulli vetulae, multi obstetrici (quae corrupta multorum est opinio) nec ulli homini, qua tumuis maligno aut scelerato diaboli mancipio, concessum est, corporibus daemonae imprecando immittere” 12 Levack lists the following symptoms in his study of possession: convulsions, physical pain, rigidity of the limbs, muscular flexibility and contortions, preternatural strength, levitation, swelling, vomiting, loss of bodily function, fasting, [speaking in unlearned languages], [distorted] voice, trance experiences and visions, clairvoyance, and blasphemy and [recoiling from] sacred objects; see The Devil Within, pp. 6-15. There are numerous studies on demonic possession, but particularly useful works relevant to early modern medical theory and practice also include: Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), which considers the

single patient, the agency of a demon could be confidently confirmed. Nevertheless, while most documented cases of demonic affliction in particular fell short of these extremes, even the more characteristically demonic symptoms could be attributed to entirely natural causes; indeed, demonic illnesses were often understood to be natural illnesses demonically induced.13 However, it was unclear whether or not limiting demonic activity to the natural world restricted the demon to the same natural processes that fell at least potentially within the purview of the physician.

Diagnosis in the face of potentially demonic illness became significantly more complicated when physicians encountered what Delrio describes in his Disquisitiones magicae (1608 [1599–1600]) as the “most extraordinary” (prodigiosissimus) of all symptoms of demonic affliction: the vomiting of strange objects. This symptom is manifest, he says,

when the sick person ejects from the mouth or the back of the throat, thorns, bones, pieces of wood, pebbles, pieces of glass, needles, knives and other iron objects, balls of hair, scraps of cloth, fishing lines, the tip of an oil-lamp, and so forth, which it seems impossible to believe can be introduced into the body by eating or any other means.14

Among these many objects, the regurgitated knife is particularly interesting, because it exemplifies the diagnostic difficulties associated with this symptom’s most extreme manifestation, including the difficulty in explaining how such objects might have found their way into the body in the first place. Van Helmont later insists in his Ortus that foreign objects voided from the body, including needles and “instruments of craftsmen,” can be explained naturalistically and therefore submitted

theological perspective on different forms of spirit possession; Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), which focuses more on the experiences of demoniacs; and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), which considers natural philosophical perspectives on demonology. 13 On demonic disease in particular, see esp. Donald Beecher, “Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination,” in Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. Yasmin Haskell (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2011), pp. 103–38; Marianne Closson, “The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Claire L. Carlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 63–76; and Stuart Clark, “Demons and Disease: The Disenchantment of the Sick (1500 – 1700),” in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 38-58. Sluhovsky discusses the “banality of exorcism” in Believe Not Every Spirit, pp. 33–60. 14 Martin Delrio, Investigations into Magic, trans. and ed. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 127; Disquisitiones magicae, p. 214: “quando per os vel imum gutturem eiicit aeger, spinas, ossa, ligna, saxa, frusta vitrorum, acus, cultros et alia ferramenta, glomos pilorum, pannos, setas, cornu lucernae, et huiusmodi, quae, vel comestione, vel aliter in corpus immitti potuisse, videtur impossibile.”

to natural remedies.15 However, in describing the symptom’s many manifestations, he also brings to the fore some of its potentially inexplicable features. One significant problem is the ingress of an object larger than the diameter of the throat, not to mention the retention and expulsion of such objects. In the case of a knife, the problem of size is compounded by the sharpness of the blade. The vomiting of pins – a more common manifestation – presented similar difficulties, in part because they were typically expelled in such large quantities; van Helmont recalls one case from 1622 in which a girl vomited around two thousand pins in a heap with other foreign detritus.16 For this and other reasons, voided objects are more difficult to attribute to natural causes than other characteristic symptoms of demonic illness, such as physical convulsions. However, while many of the reports involving strange objects vomited, excreted, or birthed from the bodies of demoniacs certainly defied belief, the symptom was not actually as rare as might be assumed. For example, a church in Vic-Sur-Seille in the Lorraine region of France was host to many successful exorcisms, and by the late sixteenth century its colonnades were said to be hung with bolts of linen filled with strange objects, including “sword-blades,” expelled from the bodies of the afflicted.17 That such objects were displayed as ex-votos in the sixteenth century speaks to the popular understanding of this symptom as a characteristic sign of demonic illness. It furthermore indicates that demonic illness was understood to necessitate supernatural healing, which by-and-large reflects orthodox interpretation in learned discourse.

Although the expulsion of strange objects may seem to challenge credibility, most learned physicians treated the symptom quite seriously: as van Helmont remarks, “It is a frequent thing, seen everywhere, and admitted by learned men.”18 The accounts are varied, including, for instance, objects expelled through the skin via ulceration after migrating through the body.19 Van Helmont

15 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 596: “Sunt deinde etiam Injecta, quae materiam supponunt visibilem. Cuiusmodi sunt spicula, spinae aciculae, paleae, pili, serraturae, lapilli, testae ovorum ollarumque, putamina et siliquae, insectae, lintea, acus, artificum organa, quae insensiliter quidem injaculantur, et invisibili prorsus modo intrant; diris tamen cruciatibus detinentur, et eiiciuntur.” 16 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 597. A recent article by Andrew Pickering focuses on similar accounts of vomiting, emphasizing its growing prevalence in seventeenth-century England; “Great News from the West of England: Witchcraft and Strange Vomiting in a Somerset Village,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 13, no. 1 (2018): 71–97. I thank Richard Raiswell for bringing this article to my attention. 17 Sluhovsky relates these accounts in Believe Not Every Spirit, p. 59. 18 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 597: “res est frequens, passim visa, a viris doctis admissa.” 19 Recent accounts of this kind of expulsion appear occasionally in medical literature. See, for example, the following report of a wooden toothbrush expelled through the abdominal wall: A. K. Sharma, R. Roat, A. Gulati, and V. Gupta, “Spontaneous Trans-Abdominal Expulsion of a Foreign Body: A Rare Occurrence,”

relates a number of cases in which patients ingested knives, darts, or needles which were then expelled through vomiting, urination, defecation, or ulceration – including one account of a man who, “with much aversion of mind,” swallowed a large spider that had fallen into the communion wine only for it to emerge later through an abscess.20 Indeed, surgeons were often summoned to extract knives or other objects in cases entirely removed from suspicion of demonic agency, in spite of the symptom’s close association with the demonic. There is, for example, a portrait held in the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave of a Prussian farmer who survived such a surgery in the 1630s.21 In the painting, he stands with his surgical scar visible, presenting the knife that surgeons from the nearby university at Königsberg extracted after its accidental ingestion (see Figure 1). The painting was gifted to the Leiden medical faculty and displayed in their anatomical theater – a marvel, perhaps, but an entirely natural, medical marvel. And yet Weyer describes the same surgical procedure in a different case that (we shall see) he discusses at length as unambiguously demonic. In either case, the surgeon’s expected role in extracting the knife – and the procedure itself – remained the same. The expulsion of strange objects, Delrio’s “most extraordinary” symptom of demonic affliction, was evidently not exclusive to the demoniac.

Weyer in fact maintains that most of the objects vomited by demoniacs can be attributed to accidental ingestion, deposits from consumed material in tumors or abscesses, or the pathological coagulation of “viscous and putrid humoral fluids” in the body, noting that these purely natural explanations carry the authority of antiquity (from Galen and Celsus) as well as the affirmation of his professional experience.22 To this we can add similar explanations from Delrio and from Lemnius, the latter of whom recounts the extraction of “pieces of fingernails, hair, shells, bones, stones” and other objects “emerging from the concretion of putrid humoral fluids.”23 Still,

Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research 9, no. 11 (2015): PD01–PD2 at https://doi.org/10.7860/JCDR/2015/13782.6755 20 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 598: “Capucinus quidam Eburo, dictus Bullonius cognomine Hampteau, araneam ingentem, quam decidisse viderat in calicem, subjugi Sacrificio, vivam, cum multa animi aversione bibit.” 21 “Portret Grunheide, Andreas, ‘De Prussiaenschen mesinslicker,’” Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, inventory number P00789, at rijksmuseumboerhaave.nl/zoeken-in-de-collectie/portret-grunheide-andreas-de- prussiaenschen-mesinslicker/P00789/. Pictured in Figure 1. I thank Harold Cook for bringing this portrait to my attention and Maaike van der Lugt for providing translation of the Dutch. 22 Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 440: “Interim naturali etiam ratione in steatomatum et atheromatum, aliorumque apostematu sinibus, carne exesa, ex uiscosis et putridis humoribus ac fibris calore coquente exiccatis, materias lapidibus, tophis, arenis, urceolorum testis, lignis, carbonibus, capillis et amurcae similes nasci, incantationibus ab imperitis ascriptas, scimus ex Galeno, Cornelio Celso, et obseruatione quotidiana.” 23 Lemnius, De miraculis, pp. 238–39: “ex sordidis vlceribus ac vomicis, vnguium, pilorum, testarum, ossiculorum, lapidum fragmenta eximantur, ex humorum putridorum concretum coalita”

it had to be conceded that metal artifacts such as knives are not objects that the body can produce, even under pathological conditions. Thus the more extreme accounts of expulsion presented a considerable task for anyone seeking to explain them in natural terms.

FIGURE 1: Portrait of Andreas Grünheide, the Prussian knife-swallower. Anonymous painter, oil paint, Königsberg (Kaliningrad) c. 1635. According to the painting’s accompanying certificate, the knife is depicted to scale. Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave.

While both theologians such as Delrio and physicians such as Weyer sought to naturalize the symptoms of demonic illness, they differed in their interpretation of demonic power. Concerning the knife in particular, Delrio insists that “there is no natural way in which any putrefaction can engender in the human body needles, knives, scissors, and metallic artefacts of this kind.”24 He mentions the demon’s ability to manipulate the senses, but he claims that “without going as far as illusion” (citra fictionem), a demon could also manipulate nature in an imperceptible way in order to move metal objects into and out of the body. Delrio also notes that Weyer, “a man with no brain” (homo fronte nulla), had previously considered and rejected this interpretation of demonic activity.25

Weyer spills a great deal of ink against the notion that demons and their servants are capable of causing all of the illnesses attributed to them, in the process challenging the demonic capacity to produce real effects in nature by emphasizing the demon’s inclination to deceive.26 In this endeavor, he often recounts cases of strange vomiting in order to qualify the reality of these events. Quoting from Girolamo Cardano’s De rerum varietate (1558), for instance, Weyer relates the story of a peasant who “vomited glass and hair and nails,”27 agreeing with Cardano’s judgment that such accounts ring “partly true and partly false.”28 Weyer offers a more pointed critique of demonic power when he recounts a case of knife expulsion – that of Margaret, a twenty-year-old girl from a village near Brunswick. Margaret lost a very distinctive knife and, after encountering an old woman and then a black dog, became convinced that a demon had placed the knife inside her body.29 She was chronically ill for a year before an abscess appeared between her ribs, from

24 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 128; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, pp. 215–16: “non posse naturaliter in corpore humano generari, ex vlla putrefactione, acus, cultros, forfices, et huiusmodi metallica artificiose conformata” 25 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 128; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, pp. 215–16. 26 Weyer, as we shall see, emphasized the power of the demon to manipulate the imagination to simulate experiences that have not actually happened, forming a central part of his argument against the reality of witchcraft as described in theological demonologies. See Guido Gilgioni, “Phantastica Mutatio: Johann Weyer’s Critique of the Imagination as a Principle of Natural Metamorphosis,” in Transformative Change in Western Thought: A History of Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood, ed. Ingo Gildenhard (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 307-330. 27 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 206; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 287: “uitrum, capillos clauosque euomens” 28 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 206; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 287: “partim uera, partim falsa” 29 Black dogs were commonly associated with demons. In De praestigiis daemonum, for instance, Weyer vehemently denies an apparently widespread rumor that Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s pet dog – which was black and named Monsieur (“quod Dominum sonat”) – was actually a demon. See De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 165-66.

which a surgeon in the presence of witnesses extracted the knife in question.30 Weyer argues at length that the reality of this event as reported is impossible, insisting that the effects produced were, for the most part, illusory.31

In his evaluation of Margaret’s ordeal, Weyer allows that demons were capable of manipulating material bodies, but he claims that demonic power is exercised primarily through deception. Regarding the surgical extraction of the knife, Weyer first emphasizes that the abscess could have resulted from a demonically induced humoral imbalance. Once the physician lanced the abscess, the demon could then swiftly move the knife in question to the open wound and partly conceal it through manipulation of the air. In this way, the demon could make the knife appear to exit the body without ever placing it in the body to begin with. Weyer also notes that a knife might very well be swallowed but could not be retained in the body for a year and then expelled without producing conspicuous injuries that would undoubtedly be fatal. He concludes that “more power than should have been was attributed to the Devil:” the apparent extraction of the knife must have been a demonic illusion.32

Notably, Weyer does not challenge the credibility of the witnesses, agreeing that the illness was unambiguously demonic “as testified by many who were there present, even the most experienced.”33 Rather, Weyer’s evaluation of the demon’s involvement restricts demonic power by challenging the reality of the expulsion of strange objects as witnessed. A demon moving too quickly for humans to register might place “nails, needles, pins” or other objects into the back of the throat, but this simulation of regurgitation is the limit of what Weyer considers to be achievable through natural operations.34 And so Weyer claims that when learned physicians witness the expulsion of strange objects, they often in fact witness an illusion. The argument could be made easily enough by deferring to the long-established demonic capacity to deceive the internal senses

30 This account is detailed in bk. 4, chap. 13 of De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 430-32. Weyer’s critique is in the following chapter, pp. 432-38. Figure 2 below depicts the knife in question. 31 See: Guido Giglioni, “Phantastica Mutatio: Johann Weyer’s Critique of the Imagination as a Principle of Natural Metamorphosis,” in Transformative Change in Western Thought: A History of Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood, ed. by Ingo Gildenhard (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 307-330. Such illusions depend upon the imagination. As Giglioni notes, the well-established activities of the imagination were sometimes extended to include the capacity to effect material changes internal or even external to the body, which held far-reaching implications concerning the power of the imagination to shape reality. This power is the subject of Chapter 2. 32 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 317; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 436: “diabolo maior tribuebatur potentia quam debuit” 33 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 318; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 437: “quemadmodum plerique etiam peritiores coram attestati sunt” 34 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 34; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 59: “claui, acus, aciculae”

through the presentation of false images to the imagination, to deceive the external senses through the manipulation of the air, and to instigate psychosomatic symptoms by inducing humoral imbalance through local motion. Beyond the demon’s capacity to deceive, Weyer is unwilling to grant any power that he understands to supersede the operations of nature.

FIGURE 2: Margaret’s knife, as pictured in De praestigiis daemonum (1583), p. 437, depicting corrosion concentrated on the blade. Weyer argues that this corrosion should be uniform across the entire knife, were it contained within the body for a year. Image courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek digital and the Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum Digitale Bibliothek.

The Demon’s Domain

It has been argued that, in the early modern period, affirming that demons could interact with the human body became a crucial theological argument for the reality of spiritual activity in the natural world.35 Only in the most extreme accounts would the reality of demonic spirits be denied; rather, it was the reality of the phenomena associated with them that was open to debate. The authenticity of an apparent case of possession could be challenged and indeed often was; the identification (and prosecution) of fraudulent possession, for instance, demonstrates the sophistication with which learned authorities approached the task of accounting for seemingly impossible phenomena that theological ontologies encouraged to be taken seriously.36 As a distinctly somatic sign of demonic illness, the expulsion of strange objects provided a sparring ground for theories of demonic influence over the body that, by extension, required that the boundaries of nature and natural operations be more carefully delineated. According to demonological theory upheld by physicians such as Weyer, the demon that transverses the boundaries of the body and violates the body’s natural processes operates in a manner contrary to human nature – but this is not the same

35 This is, for example, a central argument in Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 36 See, for example: Richard Raiswell, “Faking It: A Case of Counterfeit Possession in the Reign of James I,” Reniassance and Reformation 23, no. 3 (1999): 29-48. Stephens suggests that in grappling with explanation, even demonologists struggled to believe the phenomena they insisted must be real: Stephens, Demon Lovers, pp. 87-124.

as violating the natural order. The nature of the demon was therefore central to this broader discussion of nature.

One of the main features of demonological debate concerned the extent to which demonic spirits were capable of acting freely in the natural world. Aquinas, for instance, argued clearly against the corporeality of demonic spirits, while granting that they could manipulate the air (being a rare element) in order to create illusory bodies through which to interact with humans.37 Augustine, however, had previously argued that demonic spirits were in possession of subtle bodies with an albeit unclear status between the corporeal and the incorporeal, and it is Augustine’s authority that is invoked by Weyer:38

Being of a fine substance, [demons] can, with God’s permission, understand and do many things (some truly, some through trickery) by means of their fineness, their [material] subtlety, their incredible speed, the keenness of their senses, and the brighter light of their nature (in all of which qualities they far surpass the awkwardness of earthly bodies and the sluggishness of earthly senses). In addition, as Augustine attests, their lifetimes extend down from the very beginning of the world, and by virtue of the long passage of time they have acquired a remarkable familiarity with far greater things than men can know, given the moment-like brevity of man’s life. 39

In this view, it is crucial to the nature of the demon that he is a fallen or corrupted angel. As corrupted creatures, demons are confined to the sublunar world and deprived of divine grace, unable to exercise the supernatural power necessary to transcend the natural order. And yet within

37 For a brief comparison of Augustine’s and Aquinas’ views on the nature of the demon, see Benjamin M. McCraw, “Augustine and Aquinas on the Demonic,” in Philosophical Approaches to Demonology, ed. Benjamin W. McCraw and Robert Arp (New York: Routledge, 2017). Cf. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, pp. 95-98. 38 Cf. Giglioni, Phantastica Mutatio, esp. pp. 321-22. Early modern demonological treatises tend to grant demonic spirits some form of corporeality, but the reality of the demonic body (and demonic interaction with human bodies) was not clearly granted in Thomistic theology; see Stephens, Demon Lovers, esp. pp. 58- 86 on demonic bodies. On the Platonic foundations of Augustine’s interpretation, see Seamus O'Neill, “The Demonic Body: Demonic Ontology and the Domicile of the Demons in Apuleius and Augustine,” in Philosophical Approaches to Demonology, ed. Benjamin W. McCraw and Robert Arp (New York: Routledge, 2017). 39 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, 26; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, 47: “quum etenim tenuis sint substantiae, sua tenuitate, subtilitate, celoritate incredibili, sensuum acrimonia, et lumine naturae lucidiore, quibus omnibus terrenorum corporum inhabilitatem et sensuum tarditatem longe lateque praecellunt, multa Dei permissu, partim uere, partim praestigiose intelligunt, et possunt. Quibus accessit, teste Augustino, diuturnioris temporis beneficio, quo eorum uita a primo aeuo protenditur, comparata insignis rerum longe maiorum experientia, quam hominibus ob breuitatem uitae momentaneam potest euenire.”

the natural world, demons are preeminent “by virtue of their brighter nature,” which remains essentially angelic. It was debated how diminished this angelic nature was in its corruption, but not, as Weyer’s account demonstrates, that demons belonged in the natural world. Demonic nature as a perversion of their former angelic nature emerges as a kind of paradox: demons belong to both realms, existing in perversion of their essential nature.40

An important consequence for natural philosophy was that demons retained their angelic insight into natural processes, coupled with a memory extending from Creation. For this reason, certain cognitive symptoms of demonic possession – including prognostication and polyglottal execrations – can be explained naturalistically by deferring to the demon’s comprehensive (and long-standing) knowledge of the natural world. Weyer emphasizes that the demon “[possesses] incomparable skill in contriving the most destructive stratagems under the most attractive guise, limitless malice, and an implacable and incurable hatred towards the human race,” adding that “he often produces wondrous effects on this account (with God’s permission, or at least His tolerance).”41 Demons are master tricksters; their supra-human knowledge of the sublunar world allows them to exploit human ignorance and produce natural effects that merely seem miraculous, or, like Margaret’s expelled knife, prove to be illusory. The only reason the demon cannot freely manipulate natural operations in malevolent ways is the need for God’s permission. So Weyer insists that the demoniac, like Job, must “take account not of the rod that strikes him but of the father who wills it.”42 Weyer’s emphasis on demonic illusion was part of this qualification of demonic power. The demon’s skill in deception allows him to fake marvels beyond his limited natural powers.

Van Helmont’s naturalistic interpretation of demonic power was therefore not unconventional in confining all knowledge and power exercised by demonic agents to the natural order. Van Helmont understood hierarchies of demons to correlate to angelic hierarchies, on which subject he defers to the authority of [pseudo-]Dionysius and the celestial hierarchy described

40 On the bounding of the demonic within the natural world, and in particular on the characterization of the demonic perversion of nature as inversion, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, esp. pp. 80-93 and pp. 161-178. 41 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 31; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 54: “artificii technas struendi perniciosissimas fuco speciosissimo incomparabilis, maliciae infinitae, odii erga genus humanum … atque hoc nomine eum saepenumero (permittente, uel saltem conniuente Deo) admirandas facere res” 42 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 450; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 616: “Non caedentis uirgae rationem ille habet, sed uolentis patris.”

in his Corpus Areopagiticum.43 Demonic power at its most wide-ranging could then only be exercised by angels fallen from the highest order, which, for instance, had a greater understanding of future events owing to their sophisticated understanding of celestial motion and its correlation to (not causation of) events in the terrestrial world. Squaring the corruption of the demon with the virtues of its angelic nature may present apparent contradictions, but van Helmont turns such contradictions into an opportunity to delineate the boundaries of demonic power in the natural world. Regarding the capacity to heal demonic illness, van Helmont writes that because demons are “confined within the scope of nature,” God has already provided within nature effective remedies for curing illnesses that involve demonic agency.44

Delrio and Weyer share similar assumptions about the demon, but Delrio specifically denies Weyer’s restriction of demonic power in relation to regurgitated objects. In fact, citing the Dominican Inquisitor Sylvester Prierias (1456–1527), Delrio claims that demons are capable of crumbling knives into sand-like powder and then reconstituting them to allow ingress, retention, and regurgitation, beyond the more common form of expulsion through ulceration.45 Delrio would not have failed to note that Weyer had already discounted this possibility with his claim that the devil could not “restore what has been totally destroyed.”46 Part of what distinguishes Delrio’s interpretation is his determination to differentiate supernatural miracles – which were strictly divine – from demonic power and the heretical magic that relied on it (such as, perhaps, van Helmont’s weapon salve). This demonic domain is beyond human understanding yet beneath the divine; that is, it is a fluid category referred to by Delrio and others as “prodigious” or “preternatural” (prodigiosus).47 The preternatural, he explains, “does not go beyond the boundaries

43 van Helmont, “Astra necessitant; non inclinant, nec significant de vita, corpore vel fortunis nati,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 127-28. Van Helmont also refers here to the paradox of the angelic fall – that is, the fact that if angels were perfectly rational, they would have had the foresight not to make the decisions that led to their fall from divine grace. In the works of Aquinas and other patristic authorities on angelology, squaring angelic rationality with the decisions leading to the angelic fall produced a paradox reflected in the paradoxical nature of the demon. See McCraw, “Augustine and Aquinas on the Demonic.” pp. 35-36. 44 Van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 569: “Etenim cum diabolus intra aream naturae coerceatur, non est desperandum, quin benignissimus Jesus remedia surrogarit pro tam atrocibus malis, in sui gloriam.” 45 Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, p. 216. 46 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 87; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 133: “Nec quoque penitus destructa redintegrare potest” 47 On the preternatural in this context, see Michelle D. Brock and David R. Winter, “Theory and Practice in Early Modern Epistemologies of the Preternatural,” Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 3-19. Daston and Park’s study of the preternatural remains a standard text, although its comment on the natural philosophical dimension of demonology is limited: Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

of the natural order, but is said simply to go beyond reasonable explanation.”48 He continues: “God, then, has instituted three orders: natural, miraculous, and prodigious; or, if you prefer, two: natural and supernatural” – with the prodigious or preternatural occupying a mercurial intermediate position.49

Delrio’s invocation of reason highlights much of the difficulty in properly delineating the supernatural and the natural when dealing with the preternatural wonders that were understood to follow from occult qualities. Occult qualities are so called because they are occulted or hidden from human understanding in the strict sense: occult qualities are inaccessible to the senses, and so the perceived effects arising from them cannot be fully understood through the investigation of sensible qualities (such as those of the elements).50 The weapon salve, for instance, may prove effective from a distance, but that distant action is not perceptible – just as the power of attraction between magnets cannot be sensed independently of its effects. The occult is therefore in an important sense unknown and, according to some, unknowable. The demon, however, possesses a comprehensive understanding of nature that reaches beyond the limitations of human reason to include occult powers that are within the bounds of nature yet escape human understanding. Following Aquinas, occult qualities and the operations reliant on them became a necessary part of reconciling patristic demonology with Aristotelian natural philosophy.51 The fundamental incompatibility of these accounts led the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), for example, to completely reject spiritual agency in the natural world, while, on the other hand,

48 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 57; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, p. 25: “non excedit terminos naturalis ordinis, sed tantum dicitur excedere ratione modi.” 49 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 57; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, p. 25: “Tres ergo Deus ordines statuit, naturalem, miraculosum, et prodigiosum: seu, si duos malis, naturalem et supernaturalem.” 50 On the status of the occult operations in early modern natural philosophy, see especially: John Henry, "The Fragmentation of Renaissance Occultism and the Decline of Magic," History of Science 46, no. 1 (2008); Keith Hutchison, "What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?," Isis 73, no. 2 (1982); and Ron Millen, "The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution," in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, ed. Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985). I have also published elsewhere a brief introduction to the concept of occult qualities: Laura Sumrall, “Occult Properties in the Renaissance,” in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Springer International Publishing, 2018), at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_959-1 51 For Aquinas’s influential text on occult operations, see “De operationibus occultis naturae,” in Opera omnia iussu Leonis XIII P. M. edita, ed. H.-F. Dondaine, vol. 43 (Roma: San Tommaso, 1976), pp. 181–86. The notion that the concept of the occult was an excuse for ignorance arose in the polemics of the early modern period; Nicolas Weill-Parot has demonstrated how the concept served as real explanation in the centuries prior: “Astrology, Astral Influences, and Occult Properties in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” Traditio 65 (2010): 201-230.

attempts to reconcile demonic activity with Aristotelian causality often fell flat.52 In one treatise positioned against Pomponazzi’s claims, Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (1580/93), the physician Andrea Cesalpino puts forward the dubious thesis that Hippocrates provided an Aristotelian precedent for demonic agency in nature, in the process nonetheless making strong claims about the possibility of treating demonic afflictions by medical intervention.53 While the status of occult qualities in natural philosophy was far from stable, they provided a means of accommodating demonic agency in an otherwise causally locked world. As Delrio states, “For natural causes do give rise to a real effect,” so demons working in nature “will be able to produce effects which are real.”54

It was necessary for demonic activity to remain within the boundaries of nature – in spite of remaining unnatural to human beings and potentially beyond human understanding – both to prevent the violation of nature’s divine order and to ensure that demonic power was not opposed to divine power in a heretical dichotomy of supernatural powers. When Delrio makes preternatural territory the domain of demons, he is preserving the supernatural as divine by properly restricting the lesser wonders performed by demons to the natural order. Delrio was particularly scandalized by the conflation of the marvelous and the miraculous, the crossing of the boundary between natural operations and the actions of their divine architect that Lemnius, for instance, was quite content to trespass, as is clearly demonstrated by the title of his treatise De miraculis occultis naturae, or On the Hidden Miracles of Nature. By drawing the boundaries of nature in this way, Delrio was seeking to attribute perceptible effects correctly in order to preserve the distinctions among divine, natural, and demonic forms of causation.

Occult qualities allowed room for demonic agency in nature, while the possibility that all perceived effects of demonic activity were mere illusions tempered the degree of demonic power claimed in demonological treatises such as Delrio’s or the Malleus maleficarum (1486), which a

52 On Pomponazzi and the secrets of nature in general, see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 203-217. 53 On Cesalpino’s demonology in the context of these natural philosophical and medical concerns, including the opinions of Weyer and Pomponazzi, see: Mark E. Clark and Kirk M. Summers, "Hippocratic medicine and Aristotelian science in the "Daemonum investigatio peripatetica" of Andrea Cesalpino," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 69, no. 4 (1995): 527-41. Cesalpino focused mostly on the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease, which challenged the theory that epilepsy had a supernatural cause beyond the efficacy of natural medicines. See: G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1-58. 54 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 78; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, p. 61: “Etenim causae naturales verum effectum gignunt … poterit igitur tum effectus veros producere.”

century prior had conceded far more to the demon. Indeed Delrio suggests that “whoever maintains that every effect is the result of trickery, or believes that every effect is real, should be regarded as a water-melon rather than a human being.”55 But this diversity of demonic activity came with epistemic difficulties. Anyone who claimed demonic action was entirely real or entirely imaginary might be a mere water-melon in Delrio’s estimation, but this left little instruction for discerning the difference between demonic illusion and real phenomena caused by demons – or, indeed, the difference between demonic activity and the independent effects of natural, occult qualities. Thus the inscrutability that allowed Delrio to conflate demonic and occult (but natural) forms of causation ipso facto undermined the etiology of the illnesses attributable to them. Even if a physician denied that demons could reconstitute powdered knives, the lesser concession that demons could, for instance, influence the body’s humors would allow the demon to instigate any natural illness in addition to the illnesses with hidden causes that already implicated demonic agency. This naturalization of demonic activity paradoxically demonized natural illness, implying that any illness could at least in part be nonnatural and beyond the capabilities of a physician. For this reason, physicians often distanced demonic agency from the natural processes through which they might act, implying that a physician could always intervene where natural causes were in effect, even if the demon must be addressed by an ecclesiastical healer.

Medicine Made Manifest

Acknowledging that demons operated within the natural world in an inscrutable way did not reduce demonic and occult forms of causation to equivalent and interchangeable explanations of extraordinary illness. For physicians especially, the distinction between the demonic and the occult in nature was a crucial one. Early modern medicine was a discipline constantly engaged, by necessity, with the obscurity of nature. Even without implicating the demonic, medical diagnosis presented considerable difficulties for professionals persistently faced with the idiosyncrasies of illness. Thus when van Helmont naturalizes the expulsion of knives, he insists on the reality of the phenomenon while maintaining that it is not effected through a uniquely demonic power. He focuses on cases in which knives pass through the interior of the body to be expelled through the skin, emphasizing, as we have seen, that this often happens without implicating the involvement of a demon.56 When the body expels a knife through the abdomen, this is accomplished not

55 Delrio, Investigations into Magic, p. 78; Delrio, Disquisitiones magicae, p. 61: “pepo sit, non homo, qui vel afferat omnes effectus esse praestigiatorios, vel credat omnes veros” 56 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 598.

through the malevolent powers of a demon (or a demonic servant) but through the natural power exercised by the body over itself as a means of restoring order through the removal of the foreign object. That the body instigates such processes in the act of maintaining health places such forms of extraordinary expulsion well within the bounds of nature. With or without demonic agency, these processes remain natural and therefore just as open to medical intervention.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, van Helmont’s precise explanation of the expulsion of objects is unique, in part because he does not restrict himself to scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy and its causal framework, which he claimed to reject.57 Van Helmont addresses the apparent impossibility of the regurgitated knife by assuming material coextension of the knife and the human body. In his interpretation, the primacy of the spiritual over the material allows foreign objects and the human body to share extension, “because the spirit may then enclose a body within itself, just as though it had taken away dimensions.”58 In part, van Helmont explicates this notion with alchemy, wherein the corporeal dimensions of natural bodies can be altered without imposing irreversible changes. In one example, he describes how metals rendered liquid by the spirit of aqua fortis could be poured through wax paper and then reconstituted.59 However, he rejects Delrio’s claim that knives could be powdered and reconstituted, denying that natural operations can reform an artifact from total dissolution.60 Part of his argument relies on the even more unusual phenomenon of vomiting creatures such as eels or frogs, which in Delrio’s understanding would indicate that a living creature had been destroyed and then restored to life. While creatures such as frogs might be generated pathologically within the body, the primacy of spirit over flesh and the material coextension that this relation enables provided a philosophical explanation for the ingress and expulsion of artifacts such as knives that neither exceeded the boundaries of nature nor deferred to a uniquely demonic cause.

Among the many other physicians who navigated this disputed territory between the demonic and the occult within nature was Jean Fernel (1497–1558), who taught Weyer at the University of Paris. In discussing the demonic capacity to enter human bodies and induce illness,

57 Van Helmont consciously (and repeatedly) opposes himself to Aristotle and other Classical (pagan) authorities, Hippocrates excepted. On van Helmont’s opposition to Aristotle (and his employment of Aristotle), see: Browne, Alice. “J.B. van Helmont’s Attack on Aristotle,” Annals of Science, 36 (1979): 575- 591. 58 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 599: “eo quod spiritus tum corpus sub se claudat, adeoque dimensiones velut adimat” 59 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 600-601. 60 van Helmont, “In jaculatorum modus intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 603-604.

he remarks that the “whole role [of demons] is outside nature.”61 When questioning whether this unnatural operation calls for a divine remedy, Fernel affirms that this is “entirely necessary.”62 Fernel’s response is not particularly remarkable, if one accepts that “outside nature” refers to a causal framework extending beyond the limitations of human experience and reason. Fernel’s deferral to ecclesiastical authority is also conventional. If demonic activity exists beyond human influence, then humans have to appeal to the only power beyond that of the demon – the supernatural power of divinity, which, within the orthodox Catholic teachings of the period, only certain people were qualified to call upon and under increasingly restricted circumstances. The same sentiments are echoed by Lemnius, who claims that “[diseases] which demons inflict absolutely do not call for natural remedies, but rather divine and supercelestial ones,” a remark that also discounts astrological medicine.63 Likewise, Weyer concedes that strictly demonic causes cannot be addressed with natural remedies, remarking that physicians often mistakenly attribute the symptoms of a demonic illness to natural causes only to find their natural medicines ineffective. However, Weyer notably refers to these symptoms of demonic illness as “specters” (larvae), against which medicine is ineffective because there is, contrary to appearances, no natural illness present.64 The demonic illness as such is the demon itself, which cannot be exorcised through the medical treatment of an illusory illness. If, however, a real illness with a natural cause is present, then Weyer maintains that a physician can attend the patient. In these examples, physicians resist the implication that seemingly inscrutable illnesses must be demonic and demonic illnesses must be incurable.

However, Lemnius, who more liberally trespasses categorical boundaries, also offers a more expansive role to occult powers in medicine. After insisting on the inefficacy of natural remedies, he does not hesitate to recommend the apotropaic qualities of certain herbs or amulets against demonic afflictions. Such amulets, he claims, work “by a specific power, and occult operation, and hidden property: the cause of which cannot be explained in any way.”65 In spite of

61 Translation and original text from Jean Fernel, Jean Fernel’s “On the Hidden Causes of Things”: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine, ed. John M. Forrester and John Henry (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 654–57: “omnis eorum trans naturam esse ratio.” Fernel consistently uses “trans naturam” to refer to diverse operations that are beyond human understanding; see, for example, bk. 2, chap. 16, “Et morbos, et remedia quaedam trans naturam esse” (pp. 646-72). 62 Fernel, On the Hidden Causes of Things, pp. 654-57: “Necesse est omnio.” 63 Lemnius, De miraculis, p. 564: “quae mali Genii inferunt, non prorsus naturalia remedia exposcunt, sed diuina ac supercoelestia” 64 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 35; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 60–61. 65 Lemnius, De miraculis, p. 572: “specifica vi, et occulto effectu, abditaque proprietate: cuius causa prorsus explicari nequit”

his insistence that physicians have no influence over demonic illness, Lemnius elsewhere claims that there are remedies with occult qualities that physicians can utilize as prophylactics or even curatives for demonic illness. In a similar turn, Fernel draws a telling distinction between demonic and occult forms of causation after first insisting that strictly demonic illnesses necessitate supernatural healing. He maintains that occult powers are “held within natural limits” and that such natural, occult powers can be harnessed to cure occult illnesses.66 Likewise Weyer, even though he concedes a great deal to demonic agency, echoes the sentiments of his former teacher when he emphasizes that physicians often fail to recognize the “hidden natural cause[s]” (occulta naturae occasio) that could be addressed with natural, occult remedies.67 The implication is that, while occult powers might or might not be potentially within the scope of human understanding, they can nevertheless legitimately assist medical practice.

Physicians were not typically bold enough to claim that a purely natural cure could be effective on its own against a disease with a demonic cause. Many did, however, grant physicians a role in the therapeutic process, and indeed Weyer maintains that physicians can use natural remedies to aid exorcism, going so far as to claim – citing Pomponazzi – that a medical cure can completely remove all symptoms of demonic affliction, as long as the demonic aspects of the illness are afterwards submitted to ecclesiastical healing.68 Likewise, van Helmont later affirms that foreign materials in the body can be addressed “in part with remedies celebrated since the rise of the primitive Church, which do not operate but miraculously … and in part … through certain simples.”69 Among simples (that is, uncompounded medicines), van Helmont recommends the “amber of Paracelsus” (electrum minerale … Paracelsi), a mineral with an apotropaic quality similar to the amulets recommended by Lemnius, in addition to detailing herbal remedies sourced from a book published by the chief physician to Emperor Maximilian II.70 Van Helmont considers miraculous remedies to be irrelevant to medical practice and its purely natural work. Nevertheless, he brazenly claims that the efficacy of exorcism relies in part on the same natural mechanisms that govern the affliction itself and its natural remedies, which certainly illuminates the circumstances

66 Fernel, On the Hidden Causes of Things, pp. 672–73: “naturae limitibus contineri” 67 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 447; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 612. 68 Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 612–13. 69 van Helmont, “In Jaculatorum Modus Intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 603–4: “partim remediis ab ortu Ecclesiae primitivae celebribus. Quae operantur, non nisi miraculose … partimque … per quaedam simplicia” 70 van Helmont, “In Jaculatorum Modus Intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 603–4.

leading to his arrest – in fact the censures from 1630 specifically condemn this claim.71 While most physicians did not reach van Helmont’s divisive conclusions, many did insist that if the properties of an illness, occult or otherwise, were natural – that is, not supernatural – then treatment should not be placed beyond the power of medicine.

Recourse to the Devil

In his critique of Delrio’s demonology, van Helmont rejects his conflation of the demonic and the occult in nature as well as his explanation for the regurgitation of knives, which seemed to carry demonic power beyond the boundaries of nature, “as if Satan were above nature, and could work impossibilities in nature.”72 He continues: “Indeed I grant [the devil] a foreign way in working: yet surely even he ought to be confined within nature.”73 The devil’s foreign power was the malevolent will that took from the demoniac the control over their own body; but even this power was only foreign to the nature of the body, not to the natural order. In van Helmont’s view, Delrio’s relegation of demonic activity to the preternatural errs by delineating a realm for demonic activity in nature that exceeds human understanding and indeed efficacy. Van Helmont does not consider occult qualities to be unintelligible simply because they are inaccessible to the senses; indeed, he complains that attributing occult operations to demonic agency is pointless because it fails to make them more comprehensible: “therefore they gain nothing, who give up the work of nature to the devil.”74

Delrio is content to conclude that the inscrutability of occult operations renders them dangerously close to the demonic and thus best avoided. From the physician’s perspective,

71 van Helmont, “De magnetica vulnerum curatione,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 779. This claim is addressed in Broeckx, “Notice sur le manuscrit,” p. 299, the fifteenth censure, “Quia exorcismi non semper operantur, etc.” In fact Catholic liturgy, including exorcism, was often cast as magical by Protestants (Weyer included), and indeed magical texts and practices had a long association with clerical communities. On the former, see, e.g., Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France, pp. 56-61; and especially, for the Dutch context: Marc Wingens, “Political Change and Demon Possession in the South of the Dutch Republic: The Confrontation of a Protestant Bailiff and a Catholic Priest in 1650,” in Dämonische Besessenheit: Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, ed. by Hans de Waardt, et al. (Bielefeld: Verlag fur Regionalgeschichte, 2005). On the “clerical underground” of ritual magic, see Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997), pp. 34-41. 72 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 597: “quasi Satanas supra naturam esset, operareturque naturae impossibilia” 73 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 597: “Dono quidem, modum operando exoticum: at sane adhuc intra naturam coerceri oportet” 74 van Helmont, “De Injectis Materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 598: “lucrantur ergo nihil, qui opus naturae in diabolum referent”

however, distinguishing natural operations from demonic agency was not only necessary for treating allegedly demonic afflictions naturally, but also for preserving the legitimate use of allegedly demonic medicines like the weapon salve. It was an ongoing contest – even within the ranks of physicians. While all of the physicians discussed here use demonological arguments to expand human influence over natural processes, Weyer stands out for dedicating an entire book in his De praestigiis to the condemnation of magic, which included such forms of natural magic as claimed by proponents of the weapon salve. Weyer was particularly sensitive to the overly ambitious claims to power that characterized the magician and the demonic pacts that presumably granted him power.75 And yet, even for Weyer, there was no need to ‘disenchant’ medicine by removing demonic agency from the causal framework used in medical diagnostics. Rather, for physicians, renegotiating the status of the demonic in the natural world was a means of challenging the limitations placed around the purview of secular medicine. As Weyer writes: “I should not be faulted because of my medical profession, I should not be accused of going beyond the limits of my calling… Anyone may investigate the truth that lies hidden in the depths.”76 From the physician’s perspective, redrawing the boundaries of nature to include the operations through which demons acted was enough to justify medical authority in the treatment of any real (that is, not purely illusory) illness.

As late as 1666, the English physician Nathaniel Hodges (1629–88), citing the Jesuit theologian Matthias Mairhofer (1549–1641), reiterates that natural occult operations can always be construed as demonic, with all of the associated religious and moral anxieties:

When any person designs the attainment of any effect without respect to natural Causes, and not heeding the conditions necessary to its production, although he doth not wittingly, and with deliberation implore the Divels help, yet working by occult and dubious waies he is most deservedly censured by all good men as guilty of a private and more secret Covenant with the Divel to co-operate with him.77

75 For example: Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 480; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, p. 653: “… blasphemiarum plaustra, libros videlicet execrabiles magno frequenter aere redimunt, e quibus satanicae scientiae mysteria, diis placet, exugant diaboli mancipia et nutricii.” 76 Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors, p. 479; Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, pp. 651-52: “non mihi professione medico, uerti debet uitio, quasi uocationis meae sepes transiliam. Veritatem enim in profunde abstrusam inuestigare licet cuilibet …” 77 Nathaniel Hodges, Vindiciæ Medicinæ & Medicorum: Or an Apology for the Profession and Professors of Physick: In Answer to the Several Pleas of Illegal Practitioners; Wherein Their Positions Are Examined, Their Cheats Discovered, and Their Danger to the Nation Asserted. As Also an Account of the Present Pest, in Answer to a Letter (London: printed by J.F. for Henry Brome, 1666), pp. 9–10.

For the physicians who engaged in the debates discussed here, demonizing the occult in nature was hence restrictive and often dangerous. For a theologian like Delrio, on the other hand, naturalizing demonic illness was at once a demonstration of the reality of demonic spiritual agency in the physical world and a very deliberate distancing of demonic action from the supernatural action exclusive to the divine. If that came at the expense of human agency in nature – or of human understanding of nature – this was certainly not the same concern for Delrio that it would be for a physician.

After extensive speculation on the demonic, van Helmont finally insists that he is not in fact overly curious about the devil’s secrets, which after all are his alone.78 Van Helmont refuses to make recourse to the devil to explain the hidden processes at work behind the extraordinary symptoms of difficult illnesses, but he does find that, discursively, the devil provides a compelling means of redrawing the philosophical and professional boundaries that govern the diagnosis and treatment of these very illnesses. This was the physician’s stake in the regurgitated knife: delineating natural boundaries and demonic power in relation to illness provided an opportunity to engage in a much broader discourse about whether or not the whole of nature was subject to human knowledge and influence – or if indeed there were secrets of nature that only demons could know and exploit to the detriment of human beings. The physician’s perspective, by necessity, led to an ambitious re-evaluation of the boundaries of nature, whether hidden or manifest. When van Helmont naturalized demonic power, he was not arguing against the reality of demonic agency in the natural world; likewise, his disempowering of the demon was not a restriction of what was possible to effect through natural operations. As we shall see, van Helmont’s redefining of demonic power was accompanied by an equivalent expansion of the human capacity to exercise influence over the natural world.

78 van Helmont, “In Jaculatorum Modus Intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 603.

CHAPTER 2 | POWERS OF HEALING AND HARMING: A THEORY OF MAGIC

In a treatise on invasive diseases, van Helmont complained that the fear of being accused of “magical crimes” too far restricted the use of magic in medicine.1 In his subsequent defense of magic – spread across a number of his treatises – van Helmont turned, surprisingly, to the trial proceedings of an accused magician named Louis Gaufridy. Gaufridy was a priest in Aix-en- Provence in southern France until he was executed in 1611 after being brought to trial for abuses he carried out, the pamphlets claimed, through demonic power.2 Such crimes that were related to magical practices provided an often publicized and therefore highly visible elaboration on the circumstances of temptation, corruption, and penitence performed through the identification and prosecution of persons said to collude with demons. In his reference to this case, however, van Helmont made a subtle distinction that turned on its head the power dynamic between demons and their servants. Van Helmont briefly invoked Gaufridy in evidence that the devil is incapable of “breaking a paper window” without the consent of his “master.”3 In the previous chapter, we saw how van Helmont used demonological arguments to expand the authority of medicine to include illnesses that involved demonic agency. In the process of doing so, he limited demonic power in the natural world, and in turn, he expanded the capacity for human beings to exercise

1 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 568: “Trementibus interim Medicis, ne conscii Magici criminis haberentur, dum opem, (quam nesciunt) sub tantis aerumnarum stricturis, proximo, forte fortuna impendisse aestimarentur.” Cf. Chapter 1, Note 2 The trial proceedings were briefly published in French in 1611: Arrest de la Cour de Parlement de Provence, portant condamnation contre Messire Louis Gaufridi, originaire du lieu de Beau-vezer lès Colmaret, Prestre beneficié en l’Eglise des Accoules de la ville de Marseille: Convaincu de Magie, & autres crimes abominables du dernier Avril, mil six cens onze (Aix-en-Provence: Jean Tholozan, 1611); Confession Faicte Par Messire Lovys Gaufridi Prestre en l’Eglise des Accoules de Marseille, Prince des Magiciens, depuis Constantinople iusques a Paris. (Aix-en-Provence: Jean Tholozan, 1611). These were soon followed by translations into English that include a novel recounting of the event, reconstructed from various documents related to the trial. On these translations, see Thibaut Maus de Rolley, “The English Afterlife of a French Magician : The Life and Death of Lewis Gaufredy (1612),” in Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, ed. Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 34-48. The more detailed account was authored by the presiding Dominican inquisitor and was published in French as well as in English translation: Sébastien Michaëlis, Histoire admirable de la possession et conversion d’une penitente, Seduite par un magicien, la faisant Sorciere & Princesse des Sorciers au pays de Provence, conduite à la S.Baume pour y estre exorcize l’an M. DC. X. au mois de Novembre, soubs l’authorité du R.P.F. Sebastien Michaelis… Ensemble la Pneumalogie ou Discours du susdit P. Michaelis (Paris: Charles Chastellain, 1613); The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent woman. Seduced by a magician that made her to become a Witch …Whereunto is annexed a Pneumology, or Discourse of Spirits. trans. W.B. (London: William Aspley, 1613). Cf. Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France, Chapter 5, pp. 62-78, which focuses on Gaufridy specifically. 3 van Helmont, “De injectis materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 599: “Imo quod diabolus nequeat frangere fenestram chartaceam, absque consensus heri, videri est ex processu, et arresto, contra Ludov. Goffredi Sagum, pronunciatum Aquisgrani Narbonae ultima Aprilis 1611.”

power over natural operations. However, by calling Gaufridy the “master” of the demon he was presumed to serve, van Helmont did not disempower witchcraft – rather, he placed the power of witchcraft in the hands of Gaufridy rather than in those of the demon. This is how van Helmont’s medicine, which would seem to bear little relevance to this trial, finds a common subject with it: both are concerned with the dynamics of power and agency in magical practice.4

In the posthumous publication of van Helmont’s collected works, the provenance of this particular treatise is difficult to trace. But it was almost certainly penned after that period of tribulation in which van Helmont found himself under arrest for his bold defense of using medicines that operated through magical means. This was a very different sort of magical crime, relating to healing rather than harming. For van Helmont, who turned from his Galenic education after earning his medical doctorate in 1599, defending magic was a central theme in his work from his earliest published treatise and the source of his legal difficulties: De magnetica vulnerum curatione, or, On the magnetic curing of wounds, a treatise that, like many of his later disease treatises, dealt with powers of remote action. In De magnetica, van Helmont began his defense of magic in medicine by invoking a hypothetical witch: “Let it be supposed that a witch violently torments an absent person … by means of a waxen figure.”5 In a surprising reversal of long-standing interpretations of witchcraft, van Helmont insisted that these “torments” were visited upon the victim not through the power of the devil but through the witch’s own natural powers. Beginning with these speculations on witchcraft, he then proceeded to argue that all kinds of magical efficacy, whether called demonic or natural, shared the same source of power unique to natural, vital spirits and empowered, ultimately, by divinity.

After its publication in 1621, De magnetica found its way into the hands of Thomas Feyens, van Helmont’s former teacher and a professor in the medical faculty at the University of Louvain.6 After reading van Helmont’s work, Feyens affixed his signature to a censure issued on behalf of the “Belgian academies” and appended to Curationis magneticae, et unguenti armarii magica impostvra, a

4 Medicine and magic are in fact largely inextricable through history into the early modern period, and both were also entangled with ecclesiastical authority. For a particularly relevant (and revealing) study, see: Maaike van der Lugt, “The Learned Physician as a Charismatic Healer: Urso of Salerno (Flourished End of Twelfth Century) on Incantations in Medicine, Magic, and Religion,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 3 (2013): 307-346. 5 van Helmont, “De magnetica vulnerum curatione,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 766: “Ponatur itaque saga, quae absentem, per figuram ceream, imprecationem, incantationem, vel etiam solo attactu praevio, valide exruciet […] hunc actum esse diabolicum, nemo addubitat. Juvat tamen, quantum huc satan, et saga quantum, adferant, discernere” 6 On the Old University of Louvain and its medical faculty, see: R. Aubert, et al., Leuven University, 1425- 1985 (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1990), pp. 78-86; 106-110.

meticulous critique of De magnetica authored by the Jesuit theologian Jean Roberti and published in the same year.7 Van Helmont’s conclusions in De magnetica were particularly odious to the treatise’s Jesuit detractors – as we saw in the previous chapter, the entire faculty of theology at Louvain condemned his work – but this censure also officiated the opposition of the medical faculty.8 Disavowed by both theologians and physicians, van Helmont soon found himself embroiled in ecclesiastical legal proceedings that would overshadow his career with the infamy of suspected heresy. Indeed, the treatise was sometimes set apart from van Helmont’s other works by later readers such as Robert Boyle, who writes in The Sceptical Chymist that “I alwayes except that Extravagant Treatise De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione, which some of his Friends affirm to have been first publish’d by his Enemies.”9 When van Helmont later complained about magical crimes, he was doubtless responding to his own protracted legal troubles, and yet in his later disease treatises, he returned to the controversial speculations on witchcraft he first forwarded in 1621 – and indeed expanded and refined them. In spite of being embittered by the condemnation of his work, van Helmont was unwilling to abandon the most controversial of his ideas, including this defense of magic and its use in medicine.

In fact, as the title suggests, De magnetica is specifically about the curative power of magic medicine and in particular the weapon salve, the ointment used to treat weapon-inflicted injuries that was briefly discussed in Chapter 1. When he penned De magnetica, van Helmont was joining a long-running debate over the operation of the salve waged between the chymical physician Rudolf Goclenius, a professor at Marburg, and the same Roberti who answered van Helmont in Curatio magnetica. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the weapon salve attracted extensive debate in the seventeenth century, because it operated at a distance to heal wounds (which were cleaned and bound and for the most part spared medical attention). Because the salve’s mechanism of operation was inaccessible to the senses and inexplicable in terms of the elemental qualities, its

7 On Roberti’s involvement in this weapon salve controversy, see: Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “Jesuits and Alchemy in the Early Seventeenth Century: Father Johannes Roberti and the Weapon Salve Controversy,” Ambix 18, no. 2 (2001): 83-101. 8 For an analysis of van Helmont’s De magnetica that focuses specifically on his relationship with Jesuit authorities, see: Mark A. Waddell, “The Perversion of Nature: Johannes Baptista Van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the Magnetic Cure of Wounds,” Canadian Journal of History 38, no. 2 (2003). 9 Robert Boyle, The Sceptical Chymist, or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, Touching the Spagyrist's Principles Commonly call'd Hypostatical; As they are wont to be Propos'd and Defended by the Generality of Alchymists. Whereunto is præmis'd Part of another Discourse relating to the same Subject (London, 1661), p. 78. Boyle refers to Francis Mercury’s assertion that his father’s manuscript was printed without his consent: Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, “Amico Lectori,” in Ortus medicinae, sig. ***1r. On the status of chymistry in the seventeenth century in relation to mechanical philosophy, see: Antonio Clericuzio, “‘Sooty Empiricks’ and Natural Philosophers: The Status of Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Science in Context 23, no. 3 (2010): 329- 350.

healing power was attributed to occult properties and generally understood to be magical by all parties involved in the controversy at hand – including Goclenius, Roberti, van Helmont, and the Belgian academies. The difficulty lay in determining whether the effect was made possible by demonic power, which as we have seen, van Helmont denied. He, like Goclenius and other advocates of natural magic, called the salve “magnetic,” insisting that it healed wounds through entirely natural powers. Nevertheless, in the elusive operation of occult powers lay the potential for such inexplicable effects to arise from demonic agency. For this reason, Feyens and his colleagues subscribed to the same interpretation as Roberti, insisting that if indeed the weapon salve did heal wounds, it did so “through diabolical power (which, we do not know, perhaps may be called magnetic) and moreover, not through natural power nor without superstition.”10 In their reading, ‘magnetic’ could effectively mean ‘diabolical.’ As seen in Chapter 1, the manipulation of occult qualities in nature did not preclude the involvement of demonic agency, which would make illicit any operations reliant upon them. The present condemnation is somewhat stronger, in that the efficacy of the salve is distinguished from natural power and presumed to involve superstitious belief. In this case, any physician administering the weapon salve successfully would then be doing so at least implicitly with the aid of demonic power and well within the purview of magical crimes.11

In order to remove remedies like the weapon salve from the suspicion of diabolical associations – and, more broadly, to distance magical efficacy from demonic agency – van Helmont shifted the focus of his argument from remote powers of healing to remote powers of harming. The waxen figure used by van Helmont’s hypothetical witch to harm her victim does indeed recall the same action over distance that made the weapon salve so infamous, and in van Helmont’s formulation, their apparently commensurate modes of remote operation were made, beyond appearances, the very basis for a theory of magic in which they were rendered operatively indistinct. This theory is present not only in the controversial De magnetica but in fact repeated throughout his collected works, including the disease treatise in which he invokes Gaufridy. In his

10 Thomas Feyens, et al, “Belgicarvm Academiarvm de Helmontii doctrina, Ivdicivm,” in: Jean Roberti, Curationis Magneticae, et Unguenti Armarii Magica Impostvra, clare demonstrata a Iohanne Roberti Societ. Iesv Sacerdote, S. Theol. Doct. Modesta Responsio Ad perniciosam Disputationem Io. Baptistae ab Helmont Bruxellensis Medicis Pyrotechnici, contra eumdem Roberti acerbe conscriptam (Luxemburg: Hubertus Reuland, 1621), p. 99: “per virtutem Diabolicam (quae an Magnetica vocetur, ignoramus) non autem per virtutem naturalem, neque sine Superstitione” 11 Bradley Mollmann has written that the Spanish Inquisition arrested more people for demonic healing than for witchcraft, suggesting that van Helmont – who lived and practiced in the Spanish Netherlands – had justified anxieties. See: “Healing with Demons? Preternatural Philosophy and Superstitious Cures in Spanish Inquisitorial Courts,” in Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period, ed. by Siam Bhayro and Catherine Rider (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 396-411.

brief mention of Gaufridy, for instance, it is significant that van Helmont refers to him not as a magician (magus) but as a witch (sagus) before empowering him over the devil. In the published accounts of his trial, Gaufridy is referred to as a “Magician” or “magicien,” a title given to indicate particularly potent magical capabilities reliant upon an intimate and willing commerce with the demonic.12 By recasting Gaufridy as a witch, van Helmont was again invoking witchcraft to discuss the occult power that he claimed broadly characterized all magical practices in order to establish new boundaries according to which its different forms should be distinguished.

Van Helmont naturalized the witch’s power in order to distance the efficacy of witchcraft from the agency of the devil and the diabolical pact that, he argued, ultimately marked witchcraft as illegitimate. He then made this power native to all human beings and humans themselves responsible for all magical action, concluding that there was but one kind of magic, which could be “indifferently employed to a good or evil end.”13 By rendering the devil powerless in even the most diabolical of magical practices, van Helmont sought to conclusively absolve magical power of any dependence on the demonic. Van Helmont’s speculations on witchcraft appear time and again in his collected works because, I argue, they served a broader argument for the legitimation of magic and its use in medicine, providing a means for him to ennoble the magician in the natural world by empowering the witch.

The Power of the Witch

In the previous chapter, I explored how van Helmont provided naturalistic explanations for symptoms of illness commonly taken to indicate demonic agency. His naturalization of demonic power was not a denial of the reality of effects attributed to the demon but in fact a reclaiming of

12 Michaelis writes for instance that Magdalene, one of Gaufridy’s victims, was particularly distressed by the accusation that she was a magician; see “Sommaire de l’Histoire du Magicien Brvsle’ A Aix l’an 1611. le dernier Auril,” in Histoire admirable, sig. d1r. Michaelis readily conflated all forms of magic with demonism, without granting any benign forms: “Au Lecteur,” in Histoire admirable, sig. b3r: “Le but de ceste Histoire est de craindre Dieu, & ses iugements, se retirer du vice pour n’offenser la Majesté diuine, & éuiter l’enfer, particulierement de quitter ou detester l’abominable peché de l’idolatrie qu’on commet perpetuellement en l’exercice de la magie, & eschole de Sathan.” Idolatria had been associated with demonism since the medieval period and featured heavily in the condemnation of magic that was included in the conclusio issued by the faculty of theology at the University of Paris in 1398; see Henricus Denifle and Aemilio Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis Pariensis, vol. 4 (Paris: Delalain, 1897), pp. 32-36, at 33: “Est autem primus articulus, quod per artes magicas et maleficia et invocationes nepharias querere familiaritates et amicitias et auxilia demonum non sit ydolatria. Error.” Cf. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law, esp. pp. 143-45. 13 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 771: “nomen magiae non expaventes, sed cum scriptura bene interpretantes, in bonum tamen et malum apicem, indifferenter usurpari posse, per usum nimirum illius potestatis, vel abusum, concessimus”

such power for legitimate use. Van Helmont’s argument for the legitimacy of magical medicine was based on his distancing the efficacy of medicines like the weapon salve from demonic power, much in the way that he naturalized the regurgitation of knives. For these purposes, the weapon salve was not of interest on its own; in fact van Helmont largely neglects the salve in favor of making broader philosophical speculations on magical effects in general. The salve, like the regurgitated knife, was merely one part of the same philosophical problem concerning the boundaries of natural knowledge and natural efficacy.

The mark of the demonic in witchcraft (and where van Helmont’s interest lay) was the efficacy of occult operations, and in particular the paradigmatic action over distance. Resolving to render such efficacy non-demonic, he turned to the malevolent ends of remote powers as used by witches – and the demonic will behind these actions – as the distinguishing features of witchcraft. In this interpretation, the demonic will to evil was the crucial marker of witchcraft, and the means by which this will was realized were made distinct from demonic agency. Van Helmont accomplished this by presenting a simple argument for the limitations of the demon’s capacity to effect his will freely in the natural world, focusing on the dynamic of power between the demon and his servants:

[...] it is necessary to discuss first what Satan himself may produce and in what way he may cooperate in the merely criminal and impious actions of witches [sagarum]: for from thence it will be apparent to what cause every effect must come to be attributed.14

The argument that van Helmont constructs draws on witchcraft prosecution, but he is not interested in what is said by or about witches in the course of such prosecution. Instead, he considers the circumstances of the trials themselves in evidence for his interpretation of demonic power. Among the claims which he presents as evidence against the power of demons, van Helmont includes the fact that witches are caught and prosecuted, and that, furthermore, such witches are inclined to confess under torture and release themselves from the demonic pact – neither of which, he argues, a demon would allow if it were in his power to prevent.15 Van Helmont adds that the witch trial as spectacle actually discourages people from seeking the aid of demons, which again he presents as contrary to demonic purposes. He presents these demonic

14 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 766: “[…] dici prius oportet, quid sui satan adferat, et quomodo cooperetur in actionibus mere nefariis et impiis sagarum; exinde namque apparebit, cui causae quis effectus tribuendus veniat.” 15 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 766-67.

purposes very simplistically: that demons have an unwavering will to harm human beings. Given the reality of witchcraft prosecution, van Helmont concludes that the malevolent will of demons is not matched by a power that allows them to enact it freely.

According to van Helmont, the efficacy of magical practices – including witchcraft – did not evince the power of demonic agents to effect their will independently in the natural world. It seems he was not interested in demonology for its capacity to provide evidence for the reality of spiritual agency in nature. Instead, van Helmont removes the efficacy of witchcraft from demonic agency by identifying a strictly human capacity to harm that evidently exceeds what can be accomplished by demons acting independently, through either local motion or through action over distance. In both manifest and occult ways of working, then, the demon required the complicity of a human agent, which, unlike the demon, possesses the capacity to harm. Removing demonic power from witchcraft is fundamental for van Helmont’s theory of magic, because it renders the efficacy of even the most criminal form of magic non-demonic while simultaneously providing an explanation for magical operations that could stand in support of its legitimacy. But distancing demonic power from the extraordinary phenomena with which they were associated without sacrificing the reality of such phenomena required that the efficacy of magic be founded in a different source.

Van Helmont’s conclusion is that the only demonic power at play in witchcraft is demonic deception. The demon possesses not power per se but the power to convince the witch that it is he – the demon – who is exercising powers that are in fact actually hers and that he can only exercise through her. Indeed, van Helmont argues, all magical efficacy follows from a power distinct to and common among all human beings:

This [power] therefore ought to be placed in that part wherein we draw nearest to the image of God. And although all things to a certain extent do also refer to that worshipful likeness, truly because humans most elegantly, most properly, and most nearly do so, therefore the image of God in humans most strongly influences, masters, and commands the likeness of God in other creatures.16

The human soul as the image of God (imago Dei) held a powerful dignity in the natural world, which granted spiritual authority over other creatures as mere likenesses of God (simulacra Dei).

16 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 767: “Haec igitur in illa parte, qua Dei imaginem proxime referimus, collocanda fuit. Et quanquam, universa quoque, quadamtenus venerandum illud simulacrum referunt: verum quia homo elegantissime, propriissime, atque proxime, ideo imago Dei in homine, praepollet, dominatur, et imperat simulacris Dei aliarum creaturarum.”

While the divine image is immanent throughout the natural world to which it gives life, the spiritual light peculiar to human beings was nearest to God and of highest dignity therein, capable of exercising influence over the rest of nature. In De magnetica, van Helmont takes witchcraft as his starting point for this discussion of imaginative power: “Therefore let it be,” he writes, “that a which kills a horse in a distant stable: there is a certain natural power derived from the spirit of the witch and not from Satan, that overwhelms or smothers the vital spirit of the horse.”17 In terms of being properly natural, there is no operative distinction between the power of the witch and the edge of the sword.18 Both actions, in fact, are accomplished through human powers – the demon only supplies a malevolent will in agreement with which they are directed. Van Helmont does not claim to know all the details concerning how this takes place. But making the perceptible effects the basis for distinguishing the involvement of the demonic means that he does not have to.

The Power of Imagination

With magical power restricted to human beings, the power of a demon can only be expressed in his capacity to align the will of a human being with his own. Van Helmont accounts for this power by arguing that the realization of the demonic will in witchcraft is fulfilled through the imagination.19 The imagination filled diverse roles in early modern natural philosophy, encompassing generative functions both epistemic and somatic. Much of the imagination’s activities were still connected to the functions assigned to it in Aristotle’s De Anima, in which he made the imagination a mediating faculty between external sense perception and internal cognitive

17 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 769: “Esto ergo saga, in stabulo absente, occidit equum: virtus quaedam naturalis, a spiritu sagae, et non a satana, derivatur, quae opprimat vel strangulet spiritum vitalem equi” 18 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 769. 19 Giglioni notes that van Helmont uses the terms imaginatio and phantasia without explicitly distinguishing what they signify. To avoid introducing precision not present in the source text, I enfold them both into imagination, which is the term I use throughout this work. See: Guido Giglioni, “The Language of Imagination in Jan Baptiste Van Helmont and Francis Glisson,” in Medical Latin from the Late Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, ed. by Wouter Brack and Herwig Deumens (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België, 2000), p. 176. On the imagination in Paracelsus, see: Heinz Schott, “Invisible Diseases – Imagination and Magnetism: Paracelsus and the Consequences,” in Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas and Their Transformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell (Leiden: Brill, 1998) and “Van Helmont and Paracelsus on Imagination: Magnetism and Medicine before Mesmer,” in Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (Kirksville, MI: 2002), pp. 135-147. The discussion of imagination in van Helmont in this latter text is limited and should be foregone in favor of Giglioni’s study.

perception.20 Van Helmont’s imagination displays some of these attributes in his explanation of how ideas and their concomitant images shape reality.21 The activities of the imagination, he writes, are both psychological and somatic in expression. In addition to mediating the mind and senses, it mediates spiritual essence and material instantiation. Van Helmont makes the powers of the imagination an important part of such processes when he makes them dependent upon the information supplied by ideas and their images:

I have discussed in this place images begotten by the imagination, whereby it may be decided in what way each corporeal thing may come into being out of an invisible and incorporeal beginning (which the ancient affirm to be entreated from the intelligible world) through imagination of the foregoing parent, imitating a certain likeness of the creation of the world once made out of the infinite nothingness by the incomprehensible Word (fiat).22

This power of the imagination to bring directives to their ends – such as those dictating natural development – is granted through a vitality imparted by divinity at the moment of Creation, which the imagination imitates to a lesser degree through the conception of ideas. As mentioned in the previous section, this divine favor came parcel with the status of human beings as the image of God. Such power in fact includes the controversial power of the weapon salve (namely action over distance), which is activated when the imagination’s generative faculties are entangled with a powerful desire and an idea that directs this will to act.

20 See Aristotle, De Anima III.vii, 431a15-431a19: “To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception … That is why the soul never thinks without an image.” English quoted from Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 685. For a concise account of the Aristotelian imagination and subsequent interpretations in a Christianized Europe, see: Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011)., pp. 23-61. See also: John O’Brien, “Reasoning with the Senses: The Humanist Imagination,” South Central Review 10, no. 2 (1993): 3-19; and, for the later development of theories of the imagination: Koen Vermeir, “The ‘physical prophet’ and the powers of the imagination. Part I: a case-study on prophecy, vapours and the imagination (1685–1710),” Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 561-91. 21 Van Helmont also grants the imagination its longstanding role in producing fanciful ideas and distorted impressions of the outside world; see: “Venatio scientiarum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 24. 22 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula Medica Inaudita. I. De Lithiasi. II. De Febribus. III. De Humoribus Galeni. IV. De Peste. Editio secunda multo emendatior (Amsterdam: Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium, 1648), p. 43: “Discussi autem hoc loco imagines, phantasia genitas, quo constet, qualiter omne corporeum proveniat ex invisibili ac incorporeo initio (quod antiquitus a mundo intelligibili peti affirmabant) per imaginationem. Antecessoris parentis, imitando quadam similitudine, mundi creationem iussu incomprehensibilis Verbi (fiat) ex infinitudine Nihili, semel factam.” This collection of disease treatises was originally published in 1644: Opuscula Medica Inaudita. I. De Lithiasi. II. De Febribus. III. De Humoribus Galeni. IV. De Peste (Cologne: Apud Jodocum Kalcoven, 1644). When referring to this collection, I cite the second edition for ease of reference.

In Recepta injecta, one of his later disease treatises, van Helmont describes the remote power that humans possess as a vital light (lumen vitale).23 In doing so, he writes about the same power that governs all forms of seminal generation – not simply of plants and animals, but of disease and other forms of communicable ideas:

Certainly that spiritual participation in light is magical, a substantial communication by the power of the word Let animals and herbs bring forth seed; and a single seed produces tens of thousands the number of seeds of equal power, and just as many seminal spirits, as light kindles light.24

This spiritual power enacts the ends of both natural development and magical efficacy, accomplished through a spiritual generation whereby the seminal images undergo multiplication through natural mechanisms of propagation. This multiplicity and fecundity that characterize the propagation of ideas also explain the communication of imaginative power over a distance. An analogy can be drawn to the work of Roger Bacon; in his optics, visual species (of which light is one example) propagate themselves through their multiplication in the air.25 In a similar fashion, spiritual light in van Helmont’s work is able to “shine forth,” communicating over a distance the operative images conceived by the imagination.

While the mechanisms behind this distant power to act may seem abstruse, van Helmont does ensure that the necessary conditions for such power to be exercised are unambiguously set forth. Networks of sympathetic correspondence accounted for passive influences common in the natural world – such as the confluence of beer fermenting and barley flowering.26 Such natural, spiritual powers were pervasive, but, as we have seen, van Helmont set apart the dignity of the spiritual power peculiar to human beings. As van Helmont describes it, this spiritual efficacy grants human beings the sole capacity to willfully direct this power to specific ends:

23 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 569. 24 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 770: “Ista nempe spiritualis lucis participatio est magica, virtute verbi (animalia et herbae producant semen) locuples communicatio, et unum producit decem myriades seminum aequivalentium, et spiritus seminales integrales totidem, tanquam de lumine lumen accenditur.” 25 Roger Bacon’s discussion of species appears in his mid-thirteenth-century text De multiplicatione specierum. On his optics in the context of early modern theories of vision, see Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 221-28. Bacon himself, in spite of vocally opposing magical practice, later acquired a reputation as a magician; see Amanda Power’s article, which also provides useful insight into the changing reputation of magic and its associated practices through history: “A Mir ror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon,” The English Historical Review 121, no. 492 (2006): 657-92. 26 van Helmont, “Vis magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 612-14.

[…] clearly there is residing in the soul a power once magical, given by God, naturally particular and proper to it, inasmuch as we are his image and engraving; likewise in this respect, conducting in a particular manner, that is, spiritually at a distance, and that much more powerfully than by any corporeal means, because, seeing that the soul is the more principal part in the body, therefore the activity proper to it is spiritual, magical, and most powerful.27

Magic is therefore a purposeful action enabled by this God-given power, which is only accessible to human beings. Van Helmont’s conclusion where witchcraft – or any other magical practice – is concerned is the same conclusion that disturbed the theologians at Louvain: that the only power at work in all forms of magic is that of the human soul, mediated by the imagination and capable of extending beyond the parameters of the body to effect change in the external world.

Yet the sympathy involved in magical operations like that of the weapon salve demands explanation beyond the capacity for action over distance; in his treatise on the plague, Tumulus pestis, van Helmont provides such explanation by relating the efficacy of sympathetic action to the passions.28 Van Helmont argues that animals, vegetation, and even minerals express sympathy, pointing to common contemporary examples such as the magnetic attributes of the lodestone. This sympathetic motion, he explains, is an expression of desire – that is, desire to remain, to reach the appointed ends of development, and to not perish.29 Sympathy is therefore an expression of self-love, and its expression implies the presence of imagination as well, however limited its presence or expression may be. By arguing that minerals exhibit effects following from sympathy, van Helmont is able to strengthen his claims about the powers of the human imagination and their role in the contraction and development of disease. If even minerals possess imaginative powers, then flesh and blood, he says, will possess such powers of a significantly greater magnitude.30 And of course, humans do: like the physician employing weapon salve, the desire expressed in the goodwill of the physician has the power to impact the efficacy of therapeutics, just as the trust of his patients (or, inversely, their despair) has the power to impact their ability to recover.

27 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 784: “habitere videlicet in anima virtutem quondam magam, a Deo datam, ipsi naturaliter propriam, et competentem, in quantum imago et sculptrum eius sumus; hactenus quoque agere peculiari modo, id est spiritualiter in distans, idque multo potentius, quam corporeis ullis adminiculis. quia cum anima sit pars corpore principalior: idcirco actio ei competens, est spiritualis, magica, et validissima.” 28 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp 41-43. 29 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 38-41. 30 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 40.

The scope of the imagination’s power comprises another clear point of contention between van Helmont and Feyens, his former teacher, who signed the condemnation of his works. Feyens restricted the effects of imaginative power to the parameters of the body, subscribing to the widespread acceptance of maternal imagination and its effects on the developing fetus.31 In doing so, Feyens only granted the imagination a peripheral role in the development and treatment of disease. By contrast, in van Helmont’s theory of disease, the imagination took center stage in both development and treatment; he furthermore implied that the powers of the imagination could exceed the parameters of the body to carry out the powerful malevolent (or benevolent) desires behind magical efficacy. The subsequent condemnation from Feyens reveals their differing views on magic and its place in medicine, but it also points to the more technical disparities in their natural philosophical writings that support these distinct conclusions regarding the legitimacy of magical practices. Van Helmont does not provide cases of patients healed with the weapon salve; instead, he uses the salve to discuss the natural processes at work in the occult action responsible for remote healing. The imagination was central to this action, and it allowed a means of naturalizing magical operation in such a way that van Helmont could invoke and dismiss Gaufridy as a witch rather than a magician – that latter of which, he argued, could not be taken to be unambiguously criminal.

The Power of the Devil

The demon’s ability to exercise power in the natural world is dependent upon his capacity to influence the free actions of human beings, and so some measure of interaction between demons and humans must be possible. At this point it is necessary to introduce a term coined by van Helmont and used diversely by him to describe natural forces of change: “blas.”32 Van Helmont uses blas to explain, for instance, how celestial bodies possess “alterative” and “local” motion by

31 See: Thomas Fienus [Feyens], De viribus imaginationes. (Louvain, 1608). Cf. L. J. Rather, “Thomas Fienus’ (1567-1631) Dialectical Investigation of the Imagination as Cause and Cure of Bodily Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 41 no. 4 (1967); and Hiro Hirai, “Imagination, Maternal Desire and Embryology in Thomas Fienus,” in Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, ed. Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), pp. 211-25. 32 Van Helmont’s discussion of blas is mainly concentrated in two treatises: “Blas meteoron,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 81-83 and “Blas humanum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 179-92. The meaning of blas is not consistently articulated in van Helmont’s works; Fransen notes that van Helmont’s translators chose varying ways of rendering the concept of blas in the vernacular, which suggests it was unclear to his contemporary readers as well: Fransen, “Exchange of Knowledge through Translation,” pp. 174-78. See also her explication of “gas” and “blas” on pp. 65-75. Cf. Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 87-95.

which they are capable of altering temperatures and stirring up winds in the upper atmosphere.33 This latter motion introduces an association with demons, who were often considered capable of stirring up tempests.34 This association is very real according to van Helmont, who claims that the demon’s capacity to act in the natural world is granted by a form of blas that allows only a limited capacity to effect local, motive change: “for he is a spirit abstracted from a corporeal being … only a local motive power of bodies has remained with him.”35 He goes on to clarify that the demon “has a native blas whereby he raises up storms of the air and ragings of the sea, as often as God permits.”36 Because demons lack true extension, they can only act in nature through the same kind of power exercised by the stars – a power that demons retain by virtue of their angelic nature. Indeed, in a familiar illustration of the demon’s impotence, van Helmont writes: “Neither can he destroy one window by himself without the assistance of his client’s freedom.”37 It is for this reason that, in van Helmont’s consideration of the regurgitated knife, he claims that the only purely demonic feature of such phenomena is the invisible manner in which the knife enters the body – not the means by which it does so.38 Demons do not have a powerful enough blas to move objects such as knives; rather, that would require a power dependent upon a human being’s free will to act – either through local motion or through the power granted by the imagination.

The importance of van Helmont’s interpretation of the powers of the imagination is clear in how it converges with his conclusions concerning the extent and limitations of demonic power. Demons may deceive, but they cannot freely and independently act to harm human beings without the aid of humans themselves:

Because the devil does not have an ideal, seminal, or sealing [sigillarem] power, such as a human being has from the dignity of the divine image, whereby brute beasts, etc., are placed under his feet, therefore the devil borrows these mental and

33 van Helmont, “Blas meteoron,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 81: “Quorsum opus habent duplici motu, locali scilicet, et alterativo.” 34 In the same treatise, van Helmont remarks that demons are capable of stirring up winds or exacerbating tempests, even when a celestial blas is lacking. See “Blas meteoron,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 81: “Idque provento naturali: alias vero cacodoemoni non raro datum, ut etiam sine Blas ventos cieat, vel Blas tempestuosum.” 35 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 569: “Est namque spiritus abstractus ab ente corporero … Sola autem potestas loco motiva corporum illi remansit” 36 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 569: “Blas nimirum natale habet, quo aeris procellas, aestusque maris, concitat quoties Deus illi permittit.” 37 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 569: “Nec enim unicam senestram per se potest diruere, absque adjumento libertatis suorum clientam.” 38 van Helmont, “In jaculatorum modus intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 603.

operative ideas of witches [Sagarum], which he is able to seal in filths and poisons. He therefore having been cursed, and completely wretched, and forsaken by the grace of God, is by himself ineffectual in the same works, unless aided by the soul of his slave.39

Van Helmont’s theory of magic focused on the causal framework of magical effects, which were understood to be manifest effects following from operations with empirically inaccessible causes. In this interpretation, the spiritual power behind magical action is natural to and accessible to humans exclusively, so that the devil requires the cooperation of a human being in order to realize his malevolent designs. Witchcraft, the preeminent manifestation of demonic power, could not be demonic in terms of its efficacy – and in this sense, van Helmont renders null the very notion of demonic power. He is not writing the demon out of nature but writing the demon out of his practices.

Even powerless, however, the demon has an important part to play in van Helmont’s theory of magic, and in fact, the demon’s agency is crucial to drawing a boundary between medical magic and criminal forms of magic. Van Helmont uses the demon by granting only that he has a capacity to will or desire specific ends, which are, of course, aimed at evil-doing: “But the devil himself, the most miserable of creatures, can do nothing except will evil.”40 While the demon may not have a capacity to effect his will freely, van Helmont insists that human beings can exert a great deal of power through a will or desire for which an idea has been conceived in the imagination. The demon cannot directly act upon a person’s immortal soul (being incorruptible), nor can he compromise free will by forcing someone to engage in sinful activity. However, through his skill in deception, the demon can influence the conative states of human beings in order to align a person’s will with his own, thereby persuading a human being to achieve his ends in his place. These evil ends are the manifestation of the demonic will and the only real marker of demonic magic, which is only truly distinct through its agency and its ends. The benevolent ends of medical magic, then, conclusively absolve it of any entanglement with demonic agency.

39 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 570: “Quandoquidem diabolus non habet vim idealem, seminalem, et sigillarem, qualem habet homo ex dignitate imaginis divinae, qua ipsius pedibus substituta sunt bruta, etc. Ergo diabolus has mutuat Ideas mentales, et operativas Sagarum, quas potest sigillare in sordibus, et venenis. Ille ergo maledictus, totusque miserrimus, et a gratia Dei derelictus, per se est inefficax eorundem operum, nisi adiutus per animam sui mancipii.” 40 van Helmont, “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 571: “Ipse autem creaturarum miserrimus diabolus, ex se nil potest, nisi male velle.”

What distinguished Gaufridy from van Helmont were the same actions and aims that marked the former as complicit in criminal forms of magic – not the power behind the acts he committed but the acts themselves and the preceding demonic pact according to which he believed he had gained this power. In van Helmont’s view, the pact was the true distinction of demonic magic as such, and the malevolent actions effected were their primary marker, rather than being distinquished according to the means by which such actions were accomplished. In identifying markers of demonic agency, van Helmont is also sure to include superstitious (and therefore powerless) observances, including improper preparations of the weapon salve appearing in Goclenius’ original tract in defense of the salve:

What the physician [Goclenius] puts forward concerning sigils, characters, gamaheu, ceremonies, and mostly vain observances, are utterly impertinent to this point; they tear down magnetism as suspicious rather than build it up. My wit compels me not to determine anything concerning them.41

The defining relation between the witch and devil was thus deceptive and exploitative. The devil needed the complicity of a human agent capable of wielding magical power, and he employed all of his skills of deception to procure this complicity. For Van Helmont, common features of magical practices involving written or spoken words or inscribed symbols, humanly intelligible or otherwise, served as elements of the demonic seduction rather than as sources of power, and for this reason could be considered superstitious. Van Helmont then distinguishes the causal framework of his own medical preparations from the inexplicable pageantry used by the devil to deceive, placing, in his view, another firm barrier between legitimate and illegitimate forms of magic.

Van Helmont considered ritual observances to be an important characteristic of demonic magic, because they were instrumental in the witch’s conversion. Few would have argued that the components of a demonic ritual possessed any inherent power – rather, their function was the part played in the procuring of the pact between the demon and his servant. This is the exchange whereby the witch was understood to be granted access to demonic power. In Recepta injecta, van Helmont reduces these observances to the status of highly visible markers of illegitimate magic which testify to the demon’s seductive skills (rather than powers):

41 van Helmont, “De magnetica vulnerum curatione,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 748: “Quae porro Medicus adfert de sigillis, characteribus gamaheu, ceremoniis, vanisque ut plurimum observantiis: sunt prorsus huc impertinentia, et potius magnetismum ceu suspectum, destruunt quam astruunt: meum non fert ingenium, de his quicquam decernere.” Gamaheu were essentially naturally-occurring talismans, consisting in images appearing in natural formations.

To this extent, he desperately encircles his [servants] with deceit, and binds them with a pact, so that at least in this way they may withdraw from God. As though in payment for the stricken contract, he might teach them secrets through which, under certain fixed forms, false words, wicked invocations, execrations, conjurations, and vows – finally by lines, figures, signs, sigils, characters, numbers, hours, motions, plants – and indeed the foulest things, and all offerings, consecrations, refinements, defilements, and empty and ineffective trifles of this sort, they were to effect extraordinary things.42

In van Helmont’s view, such practices were powerless except in their capacity to impress and thereby deceive.43 As we saw in the previous chapter, deception was a trait that had a longstanding association with demonic power – indeed Weyer invoked the deceptive skills of demons in order to challenge the reality of the effects attributed to witchcraft. Rather than deny the effects of witchcraft as illusory, van Helmont argues that the demon’s real trick is the illusion that a uniquely human power is his own. When van Helmont invokes Gaufridy, he seeks to exonerate legitimate magical practices by emphasizing that Gaufridy was not a magician but in fact a witch, and that it was not his power that made him a witch – such power is common to all humans – but rather his collusion with the demon. In turn, the witch could not be determined to be innocent by virtue of being deceived. Quite the opposite: the witch must be determined guilty by the implicit (or explicit) pact that enlists their power to the causes of the devil, a compact evinced in maleficia by the manifestation of the demonic will to evil.

The Power of Medicine

The divides that van Helmont negotiated in order to forward his defense of medical magic were not only intellectual but also professional. Gaufridy’s trial and execution, for instance, is of very little apparent relevance to physicians such as van Helmont, and indeed the trial documents themselves imply as much. At least three learned physicians and one surgeon were consulted in the course of Gaufridy’s trial, but they were tasked specifically with confirming somatic signs of

42 van Helmont, “Recepta Injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 570: “Hactenus itaque dolo, sua misere circumvenit mancipia, pactoque obstringit, saltem ut sic magis a Deo recedant. Quasi in pretium icti foederis, sit edocturus Arcana, per quae, sub certis statisque formulis, fictis verbis, invocationibus impiis, exsecrationibus, conjurationibus, votisque, lineis demum, figuris, notis, sigillis, characteribus, numeris, horis, momentis, vegetabilibus, imo et rebus spurcissimis, horumque omnium litationibus, consecrationibus, depuramentis, inquinamentis, vanisque et irritis eiusmodi suis nugamentis, sint effecturi incredibilia.” 43 van Helmont, “Recepta Injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 570: “Quia ab initio semper mendax impostor.”

demonic possession. They did so by classifying these signs as “above nature.”44 As apparent experts in delineating the natural, one might expect these men to have weighed in on the nature of the demonic manipulation of the body. Rather, it was Michaëlis himself who elaborated on this topic in an appended treatise on pneumology (concerning spiritual substances). Indeed, these medical practitioners were external witnesses to a matter negotiated by legal and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the purview of secular medicine. In the previous chapter, we saw how van Helmont, among other physicians, argued for the relevance of their medical expertise in addressing all sorts of illnesses, even when brought about at least in part by demonic activity. However, for ecclesiastical authorities such as Michaëlis (or Roberti), van Helmont’s perspective as a physician would have been as peripheral to the question of demonic power as the physicians summoned during Gaufridy’s trial to comment on the possessed state of his apparent victim. But neither was van Helmont in turn concerned with qualifying the culpability assigned to men like Gaufridy accused of magical crimes – or indeed of women accused of witchcraft. Identifying the potential for his medical practice to be seen as somehow equally culpable of demonism, van Helmont sought to sever the connection at the root and preserve magical practices for medical use, leaving the witch to serve as his foil. The dubious legality of medicines with occult means of operation was, after all, the topic that first compelled him to make written comment on the nature and limitations of demonic power.

Van Helmont performed similar boundary work in establishing the weapon salve as appropriate for use by physicians rather than the barber surgeons who commonly treated external injuries. Van Helmont’s arguments concerning witchcraft are fragmented between De magnetica and later treatises on invasive diseases, but his consideration of the physician’s professional responsibility in the event of weapon-inflicted injuries is treated elsewhere, in the brief Suscepta.45 It should not be taken for granted that a physician would be overly concerned with healing weapon- inflicted injuries. Broken bones and lesions were more properly the purview of the surgeon – but van Helmont claims that in this the surgeon in fact invades the territory of the physician. Van Helmont makes this claim not simply because he intends to expand the purview of learned medicine, but because he interprets the effects of injury on the body to edge into the territory of disease.46 By empowering the witch as the sole efficient agent in witchcraft, van Helmont preserved magical efficacy for legitimate use by the magician. Likewise, by identifying weapon-

44 Michaëlis, “Actes,” in Histoire admirable, p. 70 : “c’estoit chose pardessus nature” 45 van Helmont, “Suscepta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 617 (containing the entire treatise). 46 See Chapter 4.

inflicted injuries as proper to the physician, he was defining and defending the territory of professional medicine, delineating this territory not only in relation to the expansive repertoire of magical medicines but also in relation to that of the surgeon, taking on external injuries in general.

Van Helmont’s determination to defend the legitimate use of the weapon salve as proper to the work of physicians is more clearly tied to his discussion of witchcraft in another late treatise, the equally brief De synpatheticis mediis, which might be taken as his mature position on the issue.47 The treatise seems to have been penned in response to a book he read on the powder of sympathy that he dates to the year 1639, three years before the publication of his Febrium doctrina inaudita and a mere five years before his death.48 The powder of sympathy was a remedy for weapon-inflicted injuries that worked much like the weapon salve. The powder would be dissolved in a mixture that included water and the blood of the patient; a cloth soaked in this mixture was capable of healing from a distance without being applied to any particular weapon (although it certainly could be). In this later work, van Helmont’s understanding of the operation of weapon salve proves to have changed to establish more firmly the subtle relation between powers of healing and harming granted in part by the imagination.

In De synpatheticis mediis, van Helmont describes the operation of the powder as sympathetic rather than magnetic, and he carries further his claim that the efficacy of such sympathetic action is dependent upon the will of the operator. In the case of the powder of sympathy, the effects are “directed by desire,” which indicates the specific subject of the magical effect.49 More specifically, van Helmont explains that the mechanism of this remedy is in part tied to the ideas of the physician who applies it, harkening to the same imaginative will with which he defined action over distance: “Therefore the ideas of the person applying the sympathetic remedy are joined in the mean, and become the guides of the balm towards the object of his desires.”50 This also explained why such remedies could be effective in the hands of one physician and powerless

47 Jan Baptista van Helmont, Febrium doctrina inaudita (Antwerp: Apud viduam Joan Cnobbari, 1642); this treatise later appears in the collection of disease treatises first published in 1644 as Opuscula medica inaudita. In addition to the twelve years between the printing of De magnetica and that of the treatise mentioned by van Helmont in De synpatheticis, van Helmont’s De magnetica and his De synpatheticis also fall into the “mature” and “later” periods of his oeuvre, respectively, according to the divisions suggested by Hedesan. She dates his later works from 1634, the year of his arrest. See Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge, pp. 14-15. 48 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614. 49 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614: “Diriguntur nempe a desiderio objectum sibi specificante…” 50 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614: “Ergo Ideae applicantis remedium synpatheticum connectuntur in medio, et fiunt directrices balsami, ad objectum sui desideria.”

in the hands of another physician, who perhaps did not harbor the necessary goodwill. In De synpatheticis mediis, van Helmont clearly states that all remedies operating through a sympathetic power are in efficacy homologous with witchcraft precisely in that they share “natural means.”51 All magic is natural in its efficacy, and further classifications are made to follow from the ends of the magical action, which are determined by the will of the operator and recognizable by the benevolent or malevolent effects. This classification of magic unambiguously distinguishes acceptable, medical magical action from that which could be reliably determined to be demonic and therefore illicit.

The Ends and Means of Magic

In Roberti’s critique of van Helmont’s work, the weapon salve is condemned on the grounds that demonic power could be directed to a good or evil end - and that it was not the ends that mattered for the sake of classification but indeed what he understood to be the demonic power necessary for accomplishing both. Van Helmont’s take on the subtler relation between powers of healing and powers of harming redrew the lines according to their manifest effects. By reducing the cause to a single source of magical efficacy – and indeed a uniquely human source – he refocused on the ends as the criteria for classifying the legitimacy of magical practices: “for everything shall be judged guilty or good, from its ends and intents.”52 In this case, there is no longer a need to provide causal explanations of the perceived effects in order to judge whether or not the power is diabolical. As van Helmont writes concerning the occult:

First of all therefore, for the knowledge of occult causes, a particular effect is supposed and likewise its cause, nor is it doubted what that effect or its cause is. Rather, only the connection between them is searched for: in what manner the effect proceeds from the cause, or vice versa, in what manner and by what means such a cause may produce the effect.53

51 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 615: “Non enim quod velim infamare remedia synpathetica, eo quod diabolus operetur aliquid circa Injecta. Quid enim commune habent synpathetica, licet diabolus in Injectis cooperetur per nefaria media naturalia, a suis petita mancipiis. Res enim quaeque a finibus et intentis rea vel bona censebitur. Sufficitque, quod synpathetica cum Injectis, convenient in mediis naturalibus.” 52 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614f. 53 van Helmont, “Potestas medicaminum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 475: “Inprimis itaque ad causarum occultarum cognitionem, supponitur effectus aliquis, itemque causa illius, nec dubitatur, quisnam sit effectus, quaeve eius causa: quaeritur atem tantummodo nexus amborum: quo pacto scilicet effectus a causa procedat; vel vice versa, quo modo atque medio, causa eiusmodi effectum producat.”

In magic, the ends themselves provide the crucial distinction, and since the effects of magic are accessible to the senses, they are capable of carrying the epistemic burden necessary for disambiguating the classification of magical action that determined its legitimacy.

When van Helmont dismissed Roberti’s opinions on the weapon salve, he insisted: “Let the theologian inquire concerning God and the naturalist, truly, concerning nature.”54 Roberti responded, “Then why do you engage with theological issues?”55 By classifying remote action according to its manifest effects, van Helmont avoided the conflation of witchcraft and magical medicine only by falling into another dangerous conflation, this time with the healing power of sacred relics. In describing the efficacy of reagents used in the preparation of the weapon salve, van Helmont chose not to discuss instances in which the weapon salve had been successfully used but instead invited controversy by drawing parallels with the shroud of St. Hubert, which was famous in the Ardennes region of France for its therapeutic and even prophylactic efficacy against the bite of rabid dogs.56 Van Helmont turned to relics such as this one to argue that God, in working miracles, “for the most part walks alongside nature.”57 In other words, most divine acts in the natural world in fact utilize natural operations, meaning distinctions among the three – miracles, maleficia, and natural marvels – which must be clear, were made must less certain.58

Realizing the potentially dangerous connotations of the word “magic,” which many chose not to differentiate into benign and illicit forms, van Helmont suggests that the term need not be used at all; he writes that one call magic a “spiritual strength” (spirituale robur) instead, seeking to indicate not what magic connotated but instead the power that it promised over hidden operations in nature.59 Van Helmont’s naturalization of magical efficacy in De magnetica, and by extension his defense of magic, was aimed at legitimating the knowledge and practices that he considered to be instrumental in his medical reform. His means of accomplishing this was to attribute all magical effects to power – and then to make this power exclusive is nature to human beings, claiming that

54 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 750: “De Deo Theologus, naturalis vero de natura inquirat.” 55 Roberti, Curationis Magneticae, p. 23: “Cur tu ergo res Theologicas attingis?” 56 Van Helmont recounts this story more than once; see: “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 757; and “Demens idea,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 287-8. 57 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 757: “Deum tamen in miraculis, ut plurimum ad latus naturae ire…” 58 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 757: “par est scilicet utrobique ratio, et par modus; nisi quod in mundo materiali, sanguine et unguento, seu mediis corporalibus contingat: in supernaturali vero, per amicorum Dei reliquias, multum saltem hoc nomine venerandas” 59 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 767.

it is in the human soul that “the entire foundation of natural magic is situated.”60 This conclusion was indispensable in his natural philosophy, and indeed he was willing to retain it in spite of its potentially dangerous implications.

Worth noting is how unusual it is for van Helmont to disempower the demon only to empower the witch. His reasons for doing so involved not only a desire to legitimate magic but also a full integration of these powerful means of acting into his philosophical system of the natural world. These aims distinguish his demonology from similar works that seek to naturalize demonic power for different reasons (and therefore different conclusions). In the previous chapter, Weyer offered a comparable perspective as a physician seeking to naturalize the demonic power said to lie behind the actions of accused witches. In doing so, however, Weyer argued again and again that the disempowering of the demon was also a disempowering of the witch. He did not seek to defend the reality of witchcraft as effected through magical powers natural to human beings. The strangeness of van Helmont’s position, while evident to the historian, did not escape his readers in the seventeenth century either, as is clear in The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, a treatise published in 1677 by the English Helmontian and medical practitioner, John Webster.61 Much like Weyer, Webster published this treatise intending to undermining the reality of witchcraft in part by deferring to illusion and in part by providing naturalistic explanations for extraordinary phenomena judged to be real. In turning to the works of van Helmont, “that great Physician, Philosopher and Chymist,” Webster begins by citing his lengthy descriptions of strange vomitings.62 In his responses to van Helmont’s text, Webster demonstrates the tension arising from his attempts to reconcile his deference to van Helmont’s authority with his incredulity at the claims that van Helmont makes.

In spite of the condemnations that van Helmont fielded in his lifetime, the authority of his reputation following his death compelled even skeptical readers to take seriously his opinions on magic. Even Robert Boyle, who preferred to exclude De magnetica from the works of van Helmont, relates that an ill boy presumed to be suffering from an illness caused by witchcraft was healed through the use of van Helmont’s recommended remedy.63 For Boyle, van Helmont’s

60 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 771: “in eo nempe sitam esse totam basim magiae naturalis” 61 John Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy, but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the witch ... is utterly denied and disproved (London, 1677). 62 Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft, p. 250. 63 This remedy was the “amber of Paracelsus” mentioned in Chapter 1. See van Helmont, “In Jaculatorum Modus Intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 603–4. Boyle is quoted in Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft, 52

intellectual authority rested on the chymical work that Boyle had seen evidenced in his own laboratory; on this basis, he was compelled to take van Helmont seriously even when his opinions on different topics strained credibility. Faced with the combined authority of Boyle and van Helmont, Webster too finds himself hard-pressed to deny what van Helmont writes:

I confess it would rack the judgment even of the most credulous to the highest pitch to believe these unparallel'd Stories; but the Author relating them as of his own knowledge, and being a person of unquestionable veracity, I cannot conceive how they can rationally be denied, especially finding Mr Boyle to affirm, that in those experiments (much more relations of matters of fact) that Helmont avouched upon his own knowledge, he durst be his Compurgator.64

Nonetheless, Webster is hesitant to confirm that what van Helmont relates about the effects of witchcraft is real; he suggests that van Helmont may have been informed by witnesses who themselves were deceived in what they observed, or that perhaps such events had been counterfeited.65 Webster’s interest is in providing natural causes for the effects attributed to demonic power, and it is this that he draws from van Helmont, concluding – whether or not the effects of witchcraft were actually real – that “the Devil is author and causer of that hatred, malice, revenge and envy, that is often abounding in those that are accounted Witches … but yet we affirm, that what evil soever they perform, it is by causes and means that work naturally, and so the evil is only in the use and application, and not in the efficients or means.”66 Without committing to the reality of the phenomena associated with witchcraft, Webster argues on the authority of van Helmont that, if such effects were real, they could nonetheless be submitted to nature – and that the desires behind such effects are diabolical. For van Helmont, whose demonological work served very different aims, the argument he constructed around the naturalization of demonic power had to retain the reality of such power. Rather than attack the credulity of theologians, he disputed their understanding of natural philosophy. It was crucial for him that the reality of magical effects

pp. 248-49, citing Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (Oxford, 1663), pp. 214-215. Much scholarship has been dedicated to documenting Boyle’s debts to van Helmont; see, e.g.: Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, pp. 207-272; Allen G. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2001), pp. 73-84; and Clericuzio, “From Van Helmont to Boyle.” 64 Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft, p. 263. 65 Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft, pp. 251-52; 265-66. 66 Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft, pp. 231-32.

be retained for legitimate use, and it is for this reason that the explanation he provided for such effects is inextricable from the rest of his natural philosophy.

Powers of Healing and Harming

Much like the theologians who turned to the demonic to delineate the parameters of the supernatural (in which the devil does not participate), van Helmont invoked illicit magic in order to distinguish and legitimate the forms of magic in which he was invested. Van Helmont added his voice to the debate over the weapon salve in order to oppose the prosecution of physicians for using effective medicines with hidden powers; in this argument, he invokes the witch to deny the possibility that magic is essentially good or evil. With demonic agents rendered powerless to effect changes freely in the natural world, the efficacy of any magical action, in itself, was made insufficient to implicate the involvement of demonic agency. The moral dimension of magical practice then became not a primary means of distinction but in fact the only distinction.

Van Helmont’s witch is an archetype of illicit magic – illicit for its purposes rather than means. His works on the powers of healing and harming are therefore not principally or even tangentially about witchcraft. When he invoked the witch, he did so to discuss her power – and when he discussed the witch’s power, he referred to the same power that physicians utilized legitimately, they claimed, as natural magic. Already abstracted from the particulars of any given case, van Helmont’s investigation into witchcraft and the identity of the witch thus emerges as an investigation into magic, rather than witchcraft. His speculation on the latter extends only to the reality of the witch’s power and the legitimation of its source – including the moral distinction that absolves the magician as it condemns the witch, in the process distinguishing legitimate practitioners of magic such as himself from the likes of Gaufridy.

Van Helmont’s understanding of the human status in the natural world elided boundaries between the natural, the demonic, and the divine, bridging divine power and natural operations without the clear lines drawn by his critics. But it was for this reason that the boundary between the natural and the unnatural became of great importance for the shaping of his theory of magic. The abuses of Gaufridy and the protracted drama of exorcism and penitence that followed were not visible in van Helmont’s philosophical speculations. His interest in witchcraft did not truly extend to accused witches; rather, he was concerned with the negotiations in which their experiences were employed by intellectuals contending over the boundaries of professional and

disciplinary authority.67 Engaging in this discourse meant that he had to meet his opponents with common terms.

However sophisticated his argument, remote action to any effect would remain insufficiently distinct from the crimes of Gaufridy to fully exonerate van Helmont’s willing employment of them. His conclusions regarding the source of magical efficacy were part of his redefining of demonic power and the boundaries of nature, and as such, they were also part of the same trespassing of boundaries that provoked censure of his early work. The boundary between theology and medicine was not flexible enough to bend as far as van Helmont pushed it, and when he did so, many of his learned contemporaries perceived him to be stepping beyond his sphere of authority. Van Helmont’s writings on the sympathetic curing of wounds reveals the anxieties that caused him to read reports of Gaufridy’s execution and see in this charge of “magician” a significant threat against himself, even when no other confluence between them was apparent. These anxieties signal the complex relation between his desire to describe a Christian philosophy and the controversial manner that he considered necessary to do so, yet his confidence in the necessity of these insights into demonic power was strong enough to inspire him to continue to enlist proscribed categories of magical power and mobilize them to buttress his own medical practices, even years after surviving the controversy of his De magnetica. In both treating illnesses with hidden causes and employing medicines with hidden means, van Helmont used demonological arguments to delineate the natural world and the nature of the body within it. He did so by exploring the circumstances under which nature is subverted by a malevolent will. In his theory of disease, this exploration of nature’s subversion is echoed in the relation between the nature of disease and the nature of the body. This brings his demonological ideas to bear on what he professed was the central aim of his work: the knowledge and cure of diseases.

67 Sarah Ferber’s paper on Gaufridy’s trial includes some relevant considerations on the limitations of historical work on early modern demonology. I have deliberately limited the present discussion to van Helmont’s employment of witchcraft as he understood it and as he used it to answer specific problems arising in the course of his professional life. While Weyer could be said to hold an interest in curtailing the abuses enabled by demonological theory and its insights into witchcraft, van Helmont expresses no such interest. See: Sarah Ferber, “The Abuse of History? Identity Politics, Disordered Identity and the ‘Really Real’ in French Cases of Demonic Possession,” in Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall (London; New York: Routledge, 2016 [2008]).

PART II | DISEASE

La maladie entre et sort de l'homme comme par la porte. Georges Canguilhem

CHAPTER 3 | THE GUEST: A DEMONOLOGICAL FRAMING OF DISEASE

Again and again in his collected works, van Helmont describes the onset and development of disease as a house invaded and thrown into disorder:

Indeed in all seminal diseases, I find an occasional matter, which like a violent guest making an assault, violates the inn and law, and throws the management of the household into confusion.1

Van Helmont describes this guest in a number of different ways – not only as violent, but as hateful, hostile, and most often, foreign and strange.2 Once this guest gains entrance to the inn, it acts to overthrow the government of the house. The metaphor of the morbific guest predates van Helmont’s use of it, but in his work it obtains a new meaning.3 It is therefore not the metaphor itself which will be analyzed here to describe the relation between disease and demonology in van Helmont’s works; rather, his consistent reference to this illustration is an expression of the relation he establishes between disease and human life – between the unnatural and the natural, the external and the internal, the foreign and the familiar – that hearkens to the concept of the pathological constructed in his work on demonology. It will be demonstrated here that van Helmont transforms the morbific guest in his natural philosophy by demonizing it.

Van Helmont’s interpretation of demonic power had far-reaching implications for his medicine as well as for his natural philosophy in general. In turn, his redefining of disease was not an innovation within humoral medicine; instead, it signaled a distinct conception of the pathological. Indeed his description of the demonic would serve as a larger framework for understanding the limits of nature and natural action within which van Helmont established the metaphysics of disease. Van Helmont’s theory of disease introduced new ways of thinking about and treating illness that stemmed from his interpretations of natural processes both internal and external to the body. In this chapter, I will look at the classifications with which van Helmont

1 van Helmont, “Ignotus Hospes Morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 493: “Siquidem in cunctis morbis seminalibus, materiam reperio occasionalem, quae instar violenti hospitis, impetum facientis, hospitium atque jus violat, et aeconomiam turbat.” The title of this treatise refers to the ignorance of the learned physicians who practice humoral medicine. 2 See, e.g.: van Helmont, “Ignotus Hospes Morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 493: “odioso hospes,” and p. 503: “hospes exoticus”; “Butler,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538: “hostis hospes”; “A sede animae ad morbos,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 296: “hospes peregrinus”; and “Custos errans,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 265: “alieno hospes” 3 Van Helmont’s indebtedness to Petrus Severinus’ concept of disease, to which this notion of the guest has been attributed, is discussed below.

57 organized the myriad manifestations of disease as well as the concept of disease with which he united them as participating in the same natural essence. The nature of disease as van Helmont describes it emerges in its relations to the nature of the body and to the natural order – the register at which his demonological delineation of the natural can be seen to give rise to his description of the pathological.

Disease Is

In large part, van Helmont sought to distinguish his medical philosophy by opposing his concept of disease to a humoral understanding of what disease is and how it operates.4 This distinction begins not so much with what disease is but in the fact of its being separate and distinct from the sufferer of disease. In previous chapters, we saw how demons seem to stride the line between the natural and the unnatural, leading to their widespread association with the contested territory of the preternatural. The paradox of demonic nature is essential to bear in mind when turning to van Helmont’s theory of disease. Disease in van Helmont’s natural philosophy is first of all something – that is, van Helmont described an ontology of disease, granting it its own nature as a distinct entity in the natural world and ascribing to it both metaphysical reality and independence from the body. Van Helmont uses the details of this ontology to frame a new understanding of disease, with which he directs physicians to approach medical practice with particular aims and particular tools to achieve those aims.

Van Helmont was deliberately iconoclastic in his treatment of academic medicine as he was taught it at Louvain, and he is exhaustive in his vituperation of medical philosophy and practice that he identifies as Galenic.5 But apart from the many specific points on which van Helmont opposes his work to ‘pagan’ medicine, the definition of disease offers a clear delineation that leads to distinct taxonomic structures and distinct practices supported by these classifications. Galen supplied a general definition of disease more than once in the collected works utilized in early modern universities, characterizing disease as a condition under which normal bodily activity is

4 On the Hippocratic foundations of humoral theory and its subsequent developments, see: Jacques Jouanna, “The Legacy of the Hippocratic Treatise The Nature of Man: The Theory of the Four Humours,” in Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers, trans. by Neil Allies and ed. by Philip van der Eijk (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 335-359. For a general introduction to humoral theory in medical history, see: Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 5 Van Helmont received his medical doctorate from Louvain in 1599, and the medical curriculum standardized at Louvain after 1617 still prescribed Galen for foundational theory: Corneille Broeckx, Prodrome de l'Histoire de la Faculté de Médecine de l’Ancienne Universté de Louvain (Anvers: J.-E. Buschmann, 1865), p. 69. See also: R. Aubert, et al., Leuven University, pp. 78-86; 106-110.

58 negatively impacted.6 This impaired activity may also be described as physiological dysfunction, and indeed humoral physicians treated disease as a condition of dysfunction, commonly arising from an imbalance of the body’s four humors in response to myriad potential internal and external factors. In this system, disease is a state or condition of either psychical or physical excess or deficiency that harms bodily activity; it does not exist independently of its manifestations and has no distinct and independent essence.7 Van Helmont, however, dismisses humoral medicine and its explanatory framework for diagnosis and treatment as “mere fictions” (mera figmenta) of physicians he collectively terms and derides as Galenists.8 The fundamental distinction that emerges from this crafted opposition to the Galenic framing of disease is that, whereas in Galen’s works disease is defined as a condition of dysfunction, in van Helmont’s works it is defined on a distinct metaphysical basis dependent upon a different understanding of the relation between disease and the body.

The Seed

When van Helmont made disease an ens, he ensured its participation in the same fundamental aspects of being as other things in the natural world that proceed “from non-being into being” (de nonente ad ens) through natural processes of generation.9 All such processes are dependent upon

6 On Galen’s understanding of disease diagnosis and treatment in relation to physiological impairment specifically, see: Luis Alejandro Salas, “Galen’s Wounds: Dissolutions and the Theoretical Structure of Galen’s Disease Taxonomy,” Classical Antiquity 38 no. 2 (2019): 275-297; and Philip J. van der Eijk, “Therapeutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. R. J. Hankinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 283-303. On the classification of diseases and symptoms in Galen, see Galen on Diseases and Symptoms, trans. and ed. Ian Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 65-80. 7 On Galen’s definition of disease and its sources, see: Luis Alejandro Salas, “Galen on the Definition of Disease,” American Journal of Philology 144, no. 4 (2020): 603-634. On p. 619, Salas writes that Galen “analyzes disease as determined by three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. It is: 1) a physical condition (διάθεσις) or constitution (κατασκευή) that is 2) contrary to nature (παρὰ φύσιν) and 3) impedes biological activity or function (ἐνέργεια)” (Salas explicates the term energeia (ἐνέργεια) as referring to activity or function on pp. 627-230). Cf. Johnston, Galen on Diseases and Symptoms, pp. 69-70: “In this work [De morborum differentiis] the key definition, that of disease, is given first in terms of a constitution (kataskeue) or condition (diathesis) damaging or interfering with function (energeia) and then more specifically in terms of being ‘out of balance’ (ametros).” The morbific condition as out-of-balance is paired with the understanding of health as balance. Salas quotes a representative definition from Galen’s De symptomatum differentiis: “[…] disease is a physical constitution contrary to nature and a cause of injury to activity or, more briefly: disease is a physical condition contrary to nature that is an impediment to activity (ἐνεργείας ἐμποδιστική)” (“Galen on the Definition of Disease,” p. 619). Cf. Galen on Diseases and Symptoms, pp. 21-24. 8 van Helmont, “Promissa authoris,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 6. 9 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 545.

59 seeds (semina), which contain essential ideas comparable to forms.10 To better understand this concept of seeds, it may be useful to consider an example drawn from van Helmont’s own exposition. Here, the language he uses to explicate processes of generation is botanical. Because diseases, along with other kinds of beings in nature, possess their own seeds that supply the information according to which they develop towards specific ends, seeds of disease and seeds in the common sense of the term do bear a strong metaphysical relation.11 They are both distinct entities with distinct future potentials. In a bean (the example chosen by van Helmont), the physical development of the plant from the seed is particularly easy to follow. This visible seed of the bean is enjoined with “shadowy ideas” (ideae umbratiles) that constitute the nature of the bean and direct its development.12 While the bean progresses through the visible stages of development, its morphology changes and it produces fruiting bodies, all quite distinct materially from the seed as which it began to grow. Nonetheless, these various material forms of the bean all issue forth from the same invisible seminal idea (idea seminalis) imparted to it at the moment of its creation. That seminal idea is the true seed of the bean.

Van Helmont writes that he has “dedicated every necessity of nature to seeds,” meaning that all causal necessity in the natural world, in which bodies come into being and proceed to develop by necessity towards specific ends, is supplied by seminal ideas.13 Seeds therefore impart specificity; like the bean, every disease has a seed containing its essential idea, which supplies the directive according to which that disease develops.14 While the substantial disease cannot be formed independently of the human body, its essence (its seminal idea) remains metaphysically distinct. This means that the seed of disease retains an agency distinct from both the bodily conditions that allow disease to come about and the symptoms it subsequently produces in the

10 See, e.g., van Helmont, “Formarum ortus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 128-49, esp. 137, and the discussion of seeds below. For an overview of seeds in this context and a bibliography of relevant literature, see: Hiro Hirai, “Seed concept in the Renaissance,” in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Springer International Publishing, 2019) ; and Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27 (1983): 1-34. See especially Hiro Hirai, Le concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: De Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2005), pp. 439- 62, wherein Hirai discusses van Helmont and the links between his juvenile work (the Eisogogue) and the works of Severinus. On van Helmont’s classical sources for this concept, see Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 31-32. 11 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 492. 12 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 545. 13 van Helmont, “Imago fermenti impraegnat massam semine,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 112: “Omnem naturae necessitatem seminibus dicavi.” On seminal generation, see, eg: van Helmont, “Causae, et initia naturalium,” Ortus, pp. 32-39. 14 van Helmont, “Febrium doctrina inaudita,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 17.

60 body. Such conditions do not themselves constitute disease, according to van Helmont, although they may serve as the necessary circumstances for diseases to arise or may follow from the activity of disease within the body:

First of all, I do not call disease a disposition but a transgressing being, which is stamped out of the vital archeus itself. Therefore I do not consider disease to be an abstracted quality.15

The archeus, which we will discuss shortly, was a Paracelsian term and thus not one of van Helmont’s many inventions; in fact, the same could be said for much of his disease theory. Similar ontologies of disease describing it as seminal had already been developed by other philosophers at the time that van Helmont began work on his own version; and indeed van Helmont’s understanding of disease as seminal has been well-documented as very likely following from an original interpretation of Paracelsian disease theory produced by the Danish chymist Petrus Severinus (1540-1602) in his Idea medicinae (1571).16 Within his theory of disease, Severinus established a dichotomy between the welcome guest and the foreign stranger to describe the capacity for substances to manifest as either helpful or hostile upon entering the body – qualities that could be expressed in relation to either medicines or the agents of disease.17 It has been argued that the differences between Severinus and van Helmont in terms of disease theory are more apparent than substantial.18 However, van Helmont’s ontology of disease is distinct in its framing

15 van Helmont, “Progreditur ad morborum cognitionem,” in Ortus medicinae, 535-36: “Morbum inprimis non appello diathesim: sed ipsum ens praevaricans, quod ex ipso Archeo cuditur vitali. Non ergo intueor morbum, velut abstractam qualitatem.” Van Helmont’s use of the term diathesis (which I’ve translated as disposition) is in line with humoral definition of disease in relation to the same. On diathesis, see: Salas, “Galen on the Definition of Disease,” pp. 620-622; and Erwin H. Ackerknecht, “Diathesis: The Word and the Concept in Medical History,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56, no. 3 (1982): 317-325. 16 The standard text on Severinus’ philosophical work and its influence is: Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540-1602) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004). Shackelford’s comments on van Helmont’s debt to Severinus can be found on pp. 239-49; the comparison is useful, although I argue that the extent of this intellectual debt must be qualified. In general terms, as Shackelford claims on p. 285, “Medical writers and natural philosophers used this metaphysical apparatus as he [Severinus] had used it, that is, as a biological explanation for growth and decay, sexual mixing, the unfolding of apparently new forms, and the spreading, generation, mutation, and destruction of diseases.” Severinus was in turn indebted to the work of Jean Fernel, the French physician discussed briefly in Chapter 1: Jean Fernel, Jean Fernel's On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine, ed. John M. Forrester and John Henry (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005). Van Helmont praises Fernel’s work on occult causation in disease but derides him for remaining faithful to humoral theory; see “Febrium Doctrina Inaudita,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 17: “Caeperat enim aperte contra praecedentes Scholas disputare, pro febrium nido: sed postmodum inter abdita se occultavit; stramineis nempe vinculis humorum putridorum se extricare non valens, passus est sibi eripi febrium essentiam, et cognitionem.” 17 Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine, pp. 177; 190-91. 18 Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine, pp. 246-47.

61 of the relation between the nature of disease and the nature of the body, with both intellectual and practical consequences.

Van Helmont’s pivotal departure from Severinus, for the present purposes, has in fact already been explored in the previous chapters. We have seen how magical efficacy is empowered by the imagination, and indeed this same power is also crucial in enabling development to take place in natural processes of generation. Because disease participates in these processes of generation, disease thereby depends on the same imaginative processes that account for magical efficacy as well as demonic power over human beings. It is also upon this relation that the essential distinction of disease in the natural world depends. We can take as a preliminary example the distinction between disease as a distinct entity and disease as a condition, before turning to look at generation in greater detail.

The disease seed distinguishes disease from a condition of dysfunction at the same time that it distinguishes diseases from other fecund bodies in the natural world. Hunger, for instance, is a condition of deficiency accompanied by distinct symptoms that can quickly lead to death, but hunger lacks the seminal idea that constitutes the essence of disease.19 Hunger is mere privation, whereas disease is a positively existing entity. Unlike the bean, however, disease only manifests in living bodies, meaning that it is always, as van Helmont states, a visitor or guest. The development of disease and the perfecting of its ends therefore means the destruction of the body upon which its being depends. The seed of disease introduces a foreign directive that usurps the body’s vital faculties which then take part in its own destruction, making the course of its existence subversive and parasitic. In other words, disease cannot exist without the body’s inherent power over its own health, without which disease would not be able to develop within or exercise power over the body. Indeed the same faculties that govern health – and lead to death from hunger – enable disease to develop in the body.20 One of the primary points of distinction for van Helmont’s theory of disease lies in this division of power between the seminal idea of a disease and the body’s governing faculties.

19 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 495. 20 van Helmont, “Respondet author,” in Ortus medicinae, 524; “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 494.

The Ferment

Processes of generation, according to van Helmont, require a ferment and a seminal cause in addition to a faculty that applies the seminal directive to material transformation. This faculty is the archeus, an intermediary between spiritual directive and material change.21 In van Helmont’s natural philosophy, the body’s operations depend on the systemic authority of the archeus, the “Vulcan of generation” (generationum Vulcanum) that directs orderly transformation in nature through the same processes that the chymist seeks to recreate in his laboratory through artisanal manipulation.22 Van Helmont’s adoption of the term from Paracelsus makes an important shift from the external to the internal: the archeus is a faculty familiar to the sensitive soul that directs transformations within rather than freely operating in the natural world from without, like Paracelsus’ Vulcan.23 In van Helmont’s system, the central archeus, which is responsible for the total functioning of the body, presides over its various species of archei assigned to organs and organ systems, ensuring that all the members of the body fulfill their proper functions. It governs the bodily economy that disease throws into confusion.

These processes of transformation in the body, like all material change, are provided their ends by ideas. Fermentation is the process that disposes matter to receive these ideas.24 Seminal ideas therefore provide the directive which guides the development of specific ens to maturity, while fermentation is what disposes material substances to transform under the influence of seeds:

21 The archeus is a crucial concept in van Helmont’s philosophy; he discusses it often and at length throughout the collected works. See, e.g., “Archeus faber,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 40-41 and, on its action in disease (discussed below in this chapter), “De morbis archealibus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 547-55. See also Fransen, “Exchange of Knowledge through Translation,” pp. 81-82 on the comparison of van Helmont’s discussion of the archeus between the Ortus and the Dageraad and pp. 178-83 on the term’s Paracelsian origins and its transformations in translations of van Helmont’s works. On p. 180, Fransen notes that van Helmont refers to the archeus as simply “werck-meester” (“work-master”) in the Dageraad. 22 van Helmont, “Archeus faber,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 40. Vulcan of course refers to the blacksmith, who manipulates material bodies with fire. Cf. Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 96-102. 23 See: Fransen, “Exchange of Knowledge through Translation,” p. 181. 24 On van Helmont’s concept of fermentation, see: Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 79-87. See also William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UP, 1994), pp. 141-151; and Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino, “Van Helmont’s hybrid ontology and its influence on the chemical interpretation of spirit and ferment,” Foundations of Chemistry 18 (2016): 103-112. For the influence of van Helmont’s concept of fermentation on the works of Boyle, see: Antonio Clericuzio, “From Van Helmont to Boyle. A Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeeth-Century England,” British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 3 (1993): 303-334. Clericuzio has also written about van Helmont’s concept of digestion as fermentation: “Chemical and mechanical theories of digestion in early modern medicine,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 329-337.

Be it sufficient to know that nothing new arises in nature without a seed. Every seed ultimately operates through subservient dispositions, which it propagates in matter towards the intended desire. The mediating instruments, whereby seeds dispose matter, I call ferments.25

In processes of generation, this can take place either sexually (in which the parents provide seminal characters) or spontaneously (in which there is only an “odor” of fermentation) – the latter of which includes, for example, the generation of flies, worms, toads, and mice out of the putrefaction of meat, earth, grain, or other matter that after a period of time produces a fermental odor capable of forming life.26

Truly the same reason of the ferment is everywhere, and indeed in both cases the ferment is the same principle. Because an identity is placed in the seed, either introduced by the parent or stamped on the matter from elsewhere by an external cause. At least in both cases it holds the same position of a true internal efficient.27

While sexual generation and spontaneous generation obtain their seminal ideas through slightly different conditions (one through the parents and the other through the environment), both forms of generation rely upon fermentation in comparable ways.

The material transformations made possible by ferment are intimately tied to van Helmont’s matter theory, in which, rejecting the Aristotelian elements, he argues that water is the primary material element out of which all matter (including earth) is composed and into which it will eventually decompose.28 Fermentation allows this primal matter to be transmuted into particular substances. This process is also entangled with his concept of blas, that force of change discussed in relation to demonic power in Chapter 2:

25 van Helmont, “De lithiasis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 40-41: “Sat esto, scire, nil de novo in natura oriri, citra semen; Operatur demum omne semen, per ancillantes sibi dispositiones, quas in materia ad intenta vota propagat. Media autem organa, quibus semina materias disponunt, fermenta voco.” 26 van Helmont, “Imago fermenti impraegnat massam semine,” Ortus medicinae, pp. 113-114. Cf. Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 71-74 on odors. 27 van Helmont, “Causae, et initia naturalium,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 37: “Verum eadem ubique est ratio fermenti. Adeoque fermentum utrobique principium idem est. Etenim in semine, a parente inditur, et cum eodem identitatem subit, vel aliunde, a causis externis, materiae imprimitur. Saltemque utrobique veri efficientis interni locum tenet.” 28 See: van Helmont, “Complexionum atque mistionum elementalium figmentum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 104-111. This treatise also contains his famous willow experiment, which was repeated by Robert Boyle: The Sceptical Chymist, p. 68. See also, among van Helmont’s treatises on the elements: “Aqua,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 57-60. On van Helmont’s matter theory in relation to water, see: Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 49-60; and Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 141-151.

The sublunar is not deprived of a specific blas: the fermental odors produce the most active and seminal effects, and by their perfume transmute an object in nature, and moreover they afterwards draw it into their protection.29

Indeed the blas employed in magic is the same at work in generation:

Certainly all carnal generation flows out of the power of the seed, and the power of the seed, out of the will of the flesh. Therefore carnal generation has its own blas, attending the uses of its ends, flowing out of the beginning of its being – which are the will of the flesh and the lust of virile desire. Thus there is a twofold blas in us: one that exists for natural motion, the other truly voluntary, moving itself by an internal will.30

At the foundation of the material world in van Helmont’s natural philosophy, therefore, exists the primary element, water, and semina, which fermentation disposes matter to receive. Therefore, blas does indicate some of the nuances of van Helmont’s natural philosophy, in which the same natural processes account for changes carried out by diverse agents. The concept of blas reveals a point of connection between demonic activity and the natural processes responsible for the generation of disease, however, blas is not a long-lived concept. Rather, it is largely enfolded into the actions of the archeus, which wields blas in the regulation of health and the manifestation of illness. It is therefore the archeus that we must turn to in order to fully understand how seminal ideas may come to effect change in the body.

The Archeus

Disease is intimately connected to human life, because it relies upon the body’s governing faculties in order to take root, develop, and manifest, based on the relation between immaterial directive and material change in the body:

29 Van Helmont, “Ignota action regiminis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 335: “sublunaria non sunt proprie Blas privata. Quippe odores fermentales, maxime activos, atque seminales effectus producunt, et objectum sui suffitu, in natura transmutant, atque trahunt post se in clientelam.” 30 van Helmont, “Blas humanum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 181: “Omnis quippe carnalis generatio fluit ex potestate seminis: et potestas seminis, ex voluntate carnis: igitur carnalis generatio proprium Blas habet, inserviens usibus suorum finium, fluentium ex initiis sui esse. Quae sunt voluntas carnis, et libido voluntatis virilis. Duplex itaque Blas in nobis. Unum nempe, quod naturali motu, alterum vero voluntarium, quod per internu velle sibi motor exsistit.”

The act that is of the essence, existence, and subsistence – as also concerning the propagation or fecundity of the contagion of disease – depends entirely in life, from life, through life, within which it is enclosed.31

The disease seed depends upon the archeus to carry it from non-being into being, according to the directive supplied by its seminal idea.32 Every manifestation of disease is actually produced by the archeus, making the archeus responsible for both health and illness. Disease is therefore only a substantial being within a living body, because it is dependent upon vital functions that are not present in a corpse.33 Outside of the body, disease exists only in the sense that the beanstalk already exists potentially (in potentia) in the bean. The soil cannot be conflated metaphysically with the beanstalk, but it does provide the necessary conditions for the seed to develop. Diseases can prompt the creation of foreign substances in the body – such as kidney stones, buboes, tumors, and diseased fluids – but they cannot essentially alter the body. Diseases can only occasion its destruction:

The integrity of health is in a unison and one only governor of life, no more. Therefore this governor alone is harmed in disease. Indeed it alone makes the assault, as much in the healthy as in the ill, and the breaking of it alone rends the vital economy.34

Though overcome by foreign authority, the human faculties remain metaphysically distinct from the strange guest that has usurped them. Indeed, the native functions of the governing faculties of the body must remain intact, because they are necessary for the inception and progression of disease.

The archeus governs the transformations in the body that comprise its normal functioning. When a physician addresses illness in this system, the aim is to reinstate the natural government of the archeus over the body by uprooting the disease that redirects it. This is done in part by acting on the body through the same mechanisms. Medicines in the chymical pharmacopoeia are generally intended to be ingested, which is related to van Helmont’s understanding of digestion.

31 van Helmont, “In puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 534: “Actus itaque, qui est de essentia, exsistentia et subsistentia, prout etiam de propagation, contagionisve fertilitate morborum, pendet omnino in vita, ex vita, per vitam: intra quam etiam clauditur.” 32 van Helmont, “Archeus faber,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 40. 33 van Helmont, “In puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 533. 34 van Helmont, “Respondet author,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 524: “Itaque sanitates integritas est in unison, et unicus tantum est vitae moderator, nec plures. Hic ergo solus in morbis male se habet. Is enim solus est impetum faciens, tam in sanis quam in aegris, eiusque solius ruptura oeconomiam vitalem lacerat.”

According to van Helmont, the stomach’s digestive faculty is first among the body’s six digestions, the last of which encompasses all of the individual digestions responsible for nourishing the members of the body.35 Therefore, the stomach’s digestion is pre-eminent in its power over the rest of the body, and ingested medicines are capable of far-ranging power over the body’s health in general as well as over more localized digestions. Indeed, the midriff (and more specifically the ‘mouth’ of the stomach) is the seat of the sensitive soul, of which the archeus and the imagination are both a part. Therefore the stomach (where the archeus is seated) and the spleen (where the imagination is seated) form a “duumvirate” that governs the rest of the body.36 Thus while disease exploits the archeus to exercise power over the body, so too can the physician.

At first glance, van Helmont’s concept of disease may not seem to have successfully distinguished disease entities from conditions of the body. All diseases, after all, are actually produced by the same faculties that regulate health. However, the metaphysical nuances in this theory reveal connections to van Helmont’s demonological speculations while at the same establishing distinct ways of addressing illness in practice. Van Helmont recognizes that these metaphysical nuances of his theory of disease were not clearly relevant to professional medicine, and anticipating this argument, he demonstrates that they are actually indispensable in forming an actionable concept of disease that could improve medical therapeutics:

If therefore the quiddity of diseases and the condition of morbific properties emanate out of their immediate, essential causes, necessarily also the knowledge of the aforesaid quiddity and condition must be taken out of the same causes, because the consideration of causes precedes the consideration of diseases.37

The estrangement of disease from the body does not limit the relevance of van Helmont’s theory to the idiosyncrasies of illness that formed the reality of clinical practice. Different ways of understanding the course of disease and its relation to the body produce different ways of treating

35 van Helmont, “Sextuplex digestio alimenti humani,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 201-225. Cf. “Catarrhi delirementa,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 427: “Non ergo ex uno fonte, capite humano scilicet (unde nimirum omnes catarrhos dupluere comminiscuntur Scholae) sed ex propria indispositione, fermentis topicis, superinducta, morbi oriuntur. Ita nempe vulnera sanata, recidivam patiuntur, ulcera et apostemata non raro pariunt. Et mutato ventorum axe, longo annorum cursu post recrudescunt, dolentque.” On digestion in van Helmont, see: Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 102-106; Clericuzio, “Chemical and mechanical theories of digestion in early modern medicine”; Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, pp. 43-51. 36 This physiology is described in many places throughout the Ortus, but see especially: “Jus Duumviratus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 301-314. See also: Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, pp. 100-102. 37 van Helmont, “Tractatus de morbus. Introductio diagnostica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 530: “Si ergo morborum quidditas, ac proprietatum morbidarum conditio, ex causis suis immediatis essentialibus profluant: necessario quoque praesatorum cognitio ex iisdem causis est desumenda. Eo quod consideratio causarum prior sit consideratione morborum.”

67 illness, and van Helmont’s ontology of disease served to enhance rather than limit attention to these particularities. We will return to practices of Helmontian physicians in the next chapter, after first exploring the concept of disease that shaped it.

Creating Disease

The departure of disease from the rest of nature, taken in relation to the human body, is where the concept of the pathological emerges in van Helmont’s natural philosophy. He traces this departure to the circumstances under which disease was first created.38 According to van Helmont’s interpretation of Genesis, diseases were created not by God but by human beings, who in the first act of sin realized a potential for diseases to exist in nature.39 Van Helmont’s interpretation of scripture may seem to offer little evidential power for practical medicine, but it is closely entangled with his natural philosophy, which he intended to be fundamentally Christian – as opposed to the pagan philosophies of antiquity, of which he considered Galen and Aristotle particularly representative.40 For our purposes, his interpretation of Genesis is significant because of the role that it plays in his disease theory.41 The first crucial feature of this interpretation to bear in mind is that, by making human beings the creators of disease, van Helmont establishes that diseases, along with death, entered nature through human power as well as through the diabolical deception by which human beings were persuaded to exercise that power in the first act of sin.42 This makes

38 van Helmont, “Thesis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 649: “Non ergo maledixit ipsis Deus, quoniam sibi poenas morborum, mortis et aerumnarum in supplicium comedendo contraxerant. Non autem post lapsum loquitur Deus de morbis: quia sat erat semel mortem praedixisse futurama, dum amdoneret, ne comederent.” 39 van Helmont, “In Puncto Vitae Subjectum Inhaesionis Moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 532-35. This is one point on which Shackelford falls short in his argument that van Helmont’s disease theory lacks significant departures from that of Severinus; see, e.g., A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine, p. 247. For an in-depth study of the theological ideas fundamental to van Helmont’s work, see: Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge, esp. pp. 75-135. On the Fall and its significance in seventeenth- century philosophy more generally, see: Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 162-72. 40 See also, on the Fall of Man in van Helmont’s philosophy: Hedesan, An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge, pp. 140-42. 41 Boyle also took up some of van Helmont’s chymical interpretations of Genesis; see: Michael T. Walton, “Genesis and Chemistry in the Sixteenth Century,” in Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Allen G. Debus and Michael Thomson Walton (Kirksville, MI: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998), pp. 1-14. 42 van Helmont, “Vita,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 737: “Sic nempe mors, suadente diabolo, in suum imperium stabilivit.” Cf. Chapter 2.

68 diseases truly demonic in their origin, in addition to the particulars of disease that more firmly establish this relation.

The extraordinary circumstance in which disease first entered nature tied its subsequent generation in the natural world to human corruption, making disease a fundamental consequence of that corruption.43 Mirroring the moment of disease’s creation, the archeus continually re-enacts the Fall of Man through the instantiation of disease and the self-destruction that follows from it:

The archeus, to the extent that it is vital, conducts every action in the flesh of sin, and produces every formal, hurtful, and lethal act that God refused to do, and allowed humans to stamp on themselves the cause of death.44

This interpretation of Genesis establishes disease as not only external or foreign but essentially unnatural to the human body, at the same time that it draws a relation between the creation of disease and the beginning of human mortality. Just as disease is not mere privation of vitality but in fact a perversion of it, it is likewise a truly existing, ‘positive’ evil, but of a particular kind:

Disease is a certain evil with respect to life. And although it was born of sin, it is not evil like sin, out of a cause of deficiency, lacking a species, manner, and order. But a disease is from an efficient seminal cause, positive, actual, and real, with a seed, manner, species, and order. And although in the beholding of life, it is evil, nevertheless it has the nature of good from its own simple being.45

Disease is evil, van Helmont insists, but it is not essentially evil or unnatural. These attributes only arise in relation to human life, which is the only relation in which disease is capable of existing.46

43 Mortality is the unavoidable expression of this inherited corruption. See van Helmont, “Thesis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 648: “Quia Deus legem Adamo statuerat, ne de fructu arboris scientiae boni et mali comederet: cuius transgression uti in peccatum originale defluxit: ita quoque in maledictionis perpetuitatem aequaliter a Protoplastis in posteros omnes suscitavit.” See also: “In Puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 532-35. 44 van Helmont, “In Puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 532-35: “… quoque inde Archeus, in quantum est vitalis, in carne peccati, agit omnem actionem, producitque omnem actum formalem nocuum atque lethalem, quem Deus recusavit facere, permisitque hominem sibi cudere causas mortis, et morborum.” See also: “Mortis introitus in naturam humanam decus virginum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 644-647, and “Thesis,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 647-55. 45 van Helmont, “Tractatus de morbus. Introductio diagnostica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 530: “Inprimis morbus est quidam malum, vitae respectu. Ac quanquam e peccato oriundus, non tamen est malum, instar peccati, ex causa deficientiae, cui deest species, modus et ordo. Sed morbus est ex causa efficiente seminali, positivo, actuali et reali, cum semine, modo, specie, et ordine. Et quanquam intuitu vitae, sit malum: habet tamen ex suo simplici esse naturam boni.” 46 van Helmont, “In puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 532-535; “Progreditur ad morborum cognitionem,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 536. This qualification of the evil of disease 69

Because the nature of disease is contrary to that of human beings, diseases only exist in the natural world where they are out of place – that is, where they are unnatural, hostile, and destructive.47 The paradox of a thing only existing where it is unnatural to do so is precisely van Helmont’s concept of the pathological. This pathology is what his medical philosophy is constructed around and in support of. The pathological state delineates what is natural to the human body and its faculties, by delineating its corruption. This can happen in a number of ways, all dependent upon a foreign subversion of the governing archeus. Indeed, van Helmont often describes disease as an enragement of the archeus, which can be provoked into manifesting disease. The terror or rage of the archeus is sometimes all that is necessary for disease to arise.

When van Helmont invoked the violent guest, he referred to an occasional cause entering the body and wreaking havoc in its incitement of disease. Such occasional causes may provide necessary conditions for a disease ens to materialize in the body, and therefore they are closely tied to the specificity of diseases:

The archeus, which formed us in the womb, likewise directs, guides, and moves all things during life. Therefore, occasional causes are perceived only in the archeus, which afterwards, according to the perturbation thereby conceived, brings forth its own ideas, which immediately have a blas whereby they move, direct, change, and finish everything that comes to pass in health and disease.48

Disease begins from the matter of the archeus, as it rages in us according to a foreign idea from a conceived injury, which it determines that occasional causes have done to it.49

also maintains a necessary distance from dualism by obviating the claim that evil has a positive (rather than privative) existence. 47 This framing of the nature of disease (and the concept of disease as possessing a nature) is markedly distinct from the Galenic definition of disease as unnatural. In the latter case, the pathological state is unnatural because it deviates from the biological norm dictated by an organism’s nature; for van Helmont, it is only in the relation between the nature of the body and the nature of disease that the latter can be understood as unnatural. See: Salas, “Galen on the Definition of Disease,” pp. 622-27; and Jouanna, “Galen’s Concept of Nature,” in Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers, pp. 287-311. 48 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 501: “Quod Archeus, qui nos in utero formavit, cuncta dirigit etiam, moderatur, movet durante vita. Idcirco causae occasionales percipiuntur dumtaxat in Archeo. Qui dein, iuxta conceptam inde perturbationem, parit suas Ideas, quae immediate Blas habent, quo movent, dirigunt, commutantque, et peragunt, quicquid in sanitate et morbis contingit.” 49 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 503: “Morbus ergo de materia Archei incipit, quatenus per Ideam exoticum in nos furit ex concepta injuria, quam causas occasionales fecisse sibi aestimat.”

Van Helmont’s explanation of how disease operates depends upon the distinction between the essence of disease and its somatic manifestations. While medical semiotics rely on signs and symptoms in identifying a disease and determining how it operates, for van Helmont, the observable effects of illness have to be taken separately from their causes. Treating symptoms without removing their causes will not cure a disease. This may seem simple, but the distinction between causal conditions and their signs and symptoms was often far from clear; chronic, hereditary, or occult illnesses, for instance, presented considerable challenges due to their unclear causation, as we saw in Chapter 1. Van Helmont’s taxonomy of disease remained loyal to the stress on causes, making signs and symptoms of individual diseases secondary to the essence of disease. The commonality among all diseases, according to van Helmont – that is, their common cause – is the way in which the disease seed relies on the archeus to develop.

However, there are multiple ways in which diseases can come about through secondary, occasional causes (causae occasionales), which constitute specific conditions under which either non- morbific bodily dysfunction or specific diseases can arise.50 These occasions for disease are distinct from disease itself, but humoral physicians, van Helmont complains, often treated these secondary conditions as the disease instead of targeting the real causes.51 Secondary causes did provide necessary classifications for guiding therapeutics, but van Helmont never conflates these causes with the essences of the diseases they help to bring about.

Classifying Disease

Van Helmont acknowledges the ways in which classifications of disease can be designed with comprehensibility in mind, but he insists that natural taxonomies must encompass real beings, following necessarily from their possession of seminal essences. This means that a natural

50 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 500-501; “In puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” Ortus, 534-35. Van Helmont often refers to the occasional causes of disease as poisons – an association also taken up by his readers, as we shall see in Chapter 4. 51 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 496 (See also below discussion below). One illustration van Helmont introduces to discuss the distinction between the causes and symptoms of disease is the thorn that pierces the archeus and provokes it to produce disease, much as thorns cause pain and inflammation that can be alleviated through the removal of the thorn itself (which the body sometimes does, as with the knives in Chapter 1); see: van Helmont, “Pleura Flurens,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 392-93: “Sit spina parti alicui infixa. Cui succedit in instanti dolor; a dolore, mox pulsus; a pulsu, curoris affluxus: unde tumor febris apostema, etc. Spina ergo post se movet caetera.” Cf. Pagel, Joan Baptista Van Helmont, p. 182; and Peter H. Niebyl, “The Helmontian Thorn,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45, no. 6 (1971): 570- 95.

71 nosology exists independently of human classification, following from the seeds of disease that supply their essential nature:

In the part of itself which is sealed and constituted, it consists materially in that very instant in its particular and seminary inn. But for the most part it has either an exciting occasional matter or it brings forth a product from itself, an exciting occasion of a secondary disease. But yet according to the efficient cause, it has a morbific idea, by which the matter is chosen and changed out of the vital archeus itself. So also the seed, which is stamped and polished by the archeus, is thence not otherwise begotten. Therefore in the first place there are as many species of diseases as there are morbific ideas.52

When his taxonomy of disease does follow secondary “occasional” (or “accidental”) causes (causas occasionales), van Helmont is careful to distinguish it from his understanding of disease in essence:

Any internal cause joined in the archeus is the substantial disease itself, having in it a particular root. But the occasional matter, however it is received in the body, is always external, because it is not of the inward root and essence of disease.53

A taxonomy relying on secondary causes, van Helmont freely submits, is an artificial one, but it is permissible because the seminal ideas of disease ensure the existence of a natural taxonomy to which secondary causes can be related. Therefore, secondary causes of disease are capable of assisting in gathering knowledge of disease essences – from the visible branches to the invisible root. Though Galenic physicians often mistakenly treat those causes as disease when they conflate causes and symptoms, such a taxonomy is necessary for comprehensibility; medicine is a practice, he reminds his reader, and as such it requires established categories that are already familiar to practicing physicians. Artificial classes are important for practice because they organize disease according to the conditions that consistently give rise to them and the consistent ways in which they subsequently produce pathological transformations in the body. The classifications he

52 van Helmont, “Divisio morborum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 566-67: “In parte autem sui, qua sigillariter constituitur: etiam materialiter ibidem, tanquam hospitio proprio, ac seminario, consistit. Plerumque autem habet, vel materiam occasionalem excitantem, vel parit de se productum, secundarii morbi excitativum occasionale. Pro causa autem efficiente, habet ideam morbificam: cuius ut materia desumitur, mutaturque ex ipsomet Archeo vitali: ita etiam non secus Idea inde prognascitur, quippe quae ab Archeo ipso cuditur, et limatur. Sunt itaque inprimis tot morborum species, quot idearum morbosarum.” 53 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 501: “Quod utraque causa interna, connexa in Archeo, sit ipse substantialis morbus, habens in se propriam radicem. Materia autem occasionalis, utut in corpore recepta, semper sit externa; quia non est de radice interna, et essentia morbi.”

72 presents that focus on the secondary causes of disease therefore have epistemic significance for medical semiotics in addition to their practicality for diagnosis and therapy.

This relation between etiology and nosology is evident when, for instance, distinct causes give rise to the same disease. I mentioned above that fermentation enables both sexual and spontaneous forms of generation; it is possible, however, for the same species to arise from either form of generation. Van Helmont writes that some creatures (such as mice) can be generated either from sexual or spontaneous generation, but in either case the seminal idea that ultimately gives rise to them is the same, originating either from the specific seeds produced by the parents or the specific ferment produced under particular environmental conditions, in either case endowing the same specificity in spite of these different forms of generation:

Thus a cadaver generates into worms, and these again generate sexually. So also mice generate from filths and again from parents. … At least, the immediate matter of these, and master of these generations, is in both cases simple, uniform, and of a specific identity. Therefore also, both constituted beings are of the same species, generating after their own like, without choosing.54

Likewise, the same disease can arise from a morbific idea impelled from without or stirred up from within. Whether arising internally or externally, this morbific idea is always metaphysically external to the body. The meaningful distinction between the internal and the external (in relation to the body) is therefore that existing between the natural and the unnatural or the familiar and the foreign. This poisonous ferment conditions the rise of a morbific seed; its image, once conceived in the imagination, provides the seminal cause according to which the archeus provides the material and efficient causes necessary for the disease to come into being. Given these conditions, van Helmont speculates on the relations among the causal conditions of disease, the disease being, and human vitality:

1. Whether evidently it transmutes our [archeus] into its own,

2. Or truly drives the archeus into a rage, so that being mad, he may destroy himself, and pour forth into the entire body,

3. Or indeed destroys through the privation of light, by blowing out the light of our flame in the archeus,

54 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 56: “Sic cadaver in vermes, et hi sexualiter iterum generant. Sicque mures e sordibus, iterumque e parentibus. … Proxima saltem horum materia, et agens harum generationum, utrobique est simplex, uniformis, ac specificae identitatis. Ideo et ambo consituta, sunt eiusdem speciei, generantia postmodum sibi simile, abdsque delectu…”

4. Or finally, whether it crushes the archeus beneath it, through a virulent exaltation of itself?55

Indeed there are diverse ways in which disease may arise in the body and thereafter exercise its influence over human health, but the human archeus is always necessary for the instantiation of disease. Beyond this shared beginning, the diversity of disease in its causes and manifestations guides the diverse ways in which disease should be treated. In Ignotus hospes morbus, van Helmont clarifies that curing a disease requires, in all cases, that the seminal idea of the disease be addressed in some way, either by acting to enable the archeus to overcome its influence or by removing the occasional causes that formed the conditions under which the disease could arise.56

FIGURE 3: “Morborum Phalanx: Secundum Causas Occasionales,” Ortus Medicinae (1648), p. 566. Image courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek digital and the Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum Digitale Bibliothek.

55 van Helmont, “Magnum oportet,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 163: “1. An videlicet nostram transmutent in suam. 2. An vero Archeum in furorem agant, ut seipsum amens perdat, et per totum se diffundat. 3. An vero per privationem luminis mortificent, exsufflando scilicet igniculi nostri lumen in Archeo. 4. An tandem Archeum sub se comprimant, per sui exaltationem virulentam?” 56 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 552-53.

The classification provided by van Helmont gives some structure to this diversity of disease (see Figure 3). All diseases arise from an idea residing in the “inn” of the archeus (in Archei hospitium). Once the morbific idea is conceived by the imagination, it is “clothed” by the archeus, which serves as the efficient and material cause of its being; at that point, the disease fully emerges as the strange guest in the inn of the archeus.57 The imagination is its threshold. Here is where the occasional causes come into play. Van Helmont identifies two major categories of diseases, divided according to their secondary causes, those violent instigators of disease: the first category is diseases received (recepta) and the other, diseases retained (retenta), with the latter concerned solely with diseases arising from (and among) the body’s digestions. An intermediate ground is occupied by assumta and heteroclita, those pathological states arising from things taken up (such as food or poison) and irregularities (such as sterility), which he does not treat extensively in his collected disease treatises.

In the previous chapters, I considered various facets of Recepta injecta, the treatise that contains much of van Helmont’s later writings on demonology. In fact, the primary subject of this treatise is a category of received diseases “injected” or directed to enter the body. Among received diseases, van Helmont originally identified three subcategories but later provides an account of four: occasional causes impelled by witchcraft (injecta), conceived in the imagination (concepta), breathed in (inspirata), and finally those arising from wounds (suscepta).58 On the one hand, the injecta category of received diseases naturally encourages demonological speculation, because it includes those illnesses contracted due to witchcraft – that is, those diseases brought about through a human realization of a demonic will to harm. In De magnetica, van Helmont defined the precise manner in which a human being’s generative faculties could become allied to the foreign will of a demonic agent; it should come as no surprise, then, that van Helmont’s demonology would reappear in this disease treatise. Its relevance however, extends beyond the case of witchcraft, which served as a useful topic through which to explore more far-reaching questions; indeed, van Helmont returns to the demonological framework of De magnetica in order

57 van Helmont, “Progreditur ad morborum cognitionem,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538 (sig. Zzz1v). 58 The treatises falling under each heading are as follows: “Injecta” – “Recepta injecta,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 568-73, “De injectis materialibus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 596-603, “In jaculatorum modus intrandi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 603-604; “Concepta” – “De conceptis,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 604-612, “Vis magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 612-14, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 614-15; “Inspirata” – “De inspiratis,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 615-16 ; “Suscepta” – “Suscepta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 617. Van Helmont writes that the first two categories, “injecta” and “concepta,” are not fully distinct: “De conceptis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 604: “Injectis porro simile es tens morbosum, quod Conceptorum dico. Nam etsi hoc non extrinsecus adventet, nec aliunde soveatur, imo neque illi cooperetur Satana: attamen quia sui radice, fiendi modo et effectuum quadam paritate, ab Injectis quibusdam, non multum discrepat, non inconsulto retuli Concepta, inter spiritualia Recepta.”

75 to explicate his ontology of disease, more broadly speaking. This is at least in part because these treatises deal with received diseases, and thus most clearly explicate the nature of seminal disease as it originates from outside of the body. Therefore, they explicitly treat those causes of disease most closely identified with the invasion of the body by foreign agents of disease or disease semina impelled by the power of the imagination. Van Helmont’s description of such illnesses encompasses both demonic and morbific influences in a particularly revealing manner. Their confluence rests primarily in ideas and their images, which constitute the formal directive in the seeds that eventually develop into disease within the body. Therefore, in Recepta injecta and related treatises, van Helmont finds himself most explicitly addressing what precisely constitutes disease and, thereby, what constitutes the purview of the physician. That he chooses here to return to the same material that stands at the beginning of his highly controversial De magnetica is also a significant indication of the importance of these ideas for the cogency of his medical philosophy. It is no coincidence that, in tackling the ontology of disease, his theory of disease takes shape in a demonological framework. In turn, this framework would shape his concept of disease and its implications for therapeutics beyond those diseases restricted to the recepta classification.

Wounds and Tempests

Van Helmont maintains that disease is foreign to the body while being simultaneously internal to (or “seated in”) the vital faculties. Therefore, occasional causes alone do not generate diseases and are not similarly dependent upon the body’s faculties. One of the distinctions this leads to in van Helmont’s philosophy has to do with the relation between disease and physiological function. In the previous chapter, I showed that van Helmont, in writing about the weapon salve, argued that wounds belonged to the professional domain of learned physicians rather than solely that of surgeons. Here I will return to his consideration of wounds, because his justification for treating them also entails redefining their relation to disease. In Galen’s works, function and its loss or impairment was a crucial means of identifying and classifying both diseases and symptoms, whereas van Helmont’s ontology distinguished the essences of disease from the conditions preceding, concurrent with, or following from disease. A loss of function, he argues, may be caused by disease or may produce the conditions under which disease can develop, but functional impairment, he insists, should not be metaphysically entangled with disease:

In the next place an error is detected in the definition of disease from the traditional schools – that disease is a disposition, distinguished in the injuring of the functions

[actiones]. Of course this should define the cause or the effect of the cause, and not the disease itself.59

And elsewhere:

A powerful being [potestativum ens] does not only designate an injury of functions, but also a steering of the part and an occasional force of a morbific being, sustained into the subordinate faculties, as on the vassals of an empire. It is likewise also whether the parts are at a distance from one another or nearby. For they are the bound tributes of properties.60

As mentioned, defining disease as a state of functional impairment is, to van Helmont, a conflation of a disease with its signs. He considers this interpretation of disease to stop where the epistemic task of the physician should instead begin, moving from these conditions to the essential causes and transformations of disease in a body submitted to the violence of its influence. Maintaining that the loss or impairment of function is not constitutive of disease does not distance these problems from medical practice. The change in their relation to disease does, however, change how they are to be addressed.

Van Helmont splits hairs on the point of functional impairment at least in part because, in his medical philosophy, these distinct interpretations of disease call for distinct therapeutic programs. This is partly evidenced by his works that touch on the weapon salve, and more particularly in his later treatise on the powder of sympathy, appearing in the extremely brief yet revealing De synpatheticis mediis. In the previous chapter on van Helmont’s theory of magic, we saw that this treatise was penned at most four years before van Helmont’s death and can be read as his mature position on the issue of sympathetic action. Van Helmont claims that the author of the text to which he refers had attributed the efficacy of the powder of sympathy to astrological correspondence, due to its ‘imitation’ of celestial influences. When van Helmont wrote De magnetica, he was willing to call himself a Paracelsian, and he was more amenable to considering celestial influences among potential causes of remote action that he considered to be both obvious

59 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 496-97: “Deinde deprehenditur error in definitione morbi, a scholis traditia. Nimirum, quod morbus sit dispositio, primario laedens actionem. Quippe quae causam, et non ipsum morbum, sive causae effectum definiret.” The definition of disease as functional loss or impairment is eighth in a list of errors that van Helmont attributes in this chapter to the academic understanding of disease. 60 van Helmont, “Tractatus de morbus. Introductio diagnostica,” Ortus, p. 530: “Potestativum ens itaque nedum designat functionum laesionem: sed et regimen partis, et entis morbiferi vim occasionantem, prorogatam in facultates subordinatas, tanquam imperii in vasallo. Perinde etiam sive partes procul invicem distent, sive prope sint. Nam sunt debita proprietatum tributa.”

77 and obviously natural – that is, within the boundaries of the natural order.61 Even then, however, he firmly established the efficacy of the weapon salve as a human power:

But the constellation which flows into the sword (and perhaps every seal) flows out of the microcosmic heaven, that is, out of our Olympus. Therefore useless have been the seals which were not stamped by a magician and exalted in his imagination, for certainly inferior characters and fancies [phantasiae] are forced to yield to ours, through which the wise shall be master to the stars, to the command of whom the parent of things has made subject everything that is contained in the heaven.62

Van Helmont would later reject the microcosm-macrocosm analogy that he employs here, but the magical efficacy that he uses it to articulate remains an important feature of his medical philosophy.

In De synpatheticis mediis, van Helmont doubles down on this rejection of an astrological explanation, turning more fully to the role of imagination, which he considered better equipped to capture the directive faculty of the medicine.63 This explanation echoes parts of his earlier defense of the weapon salve by once again invoking the power of the passions to effect change through the imagination. In this treatise, he argues that the powder of sympathy relies upon the goodwill of the physician who applies it – that is, that the powder’s efficacy is enabled by and dependent upon potestative ideas arising from the goodwill of the physician, much like the malevolent will that empowers witchcraft.64 In a distillation of his argument in De magnetica vulnerum curatione, van Helmont defers to the efficacy of these “stars of the mind” over the “stars of heaven.”65 Such efficacy, naturally, is also employed in diseases, because they rely on the same mechanisms to materialize and manifest. This brings us back to blas:

61 See, e.g.: van Helmont, “De magnetica vulnerum curatione,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 752-53. 62 van Helmont, “De magnetica vulnerum curatione,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 778: “Sed constellatus, quae influit in chalybem (et omne fortassis sigillum) ex coelo microcosmico, id est, ex olympo nostro fluit: irrita fuerunt idcirco sigilla, quae non a mago, in phantasia sua exaltato cuderentur: interiores nempe entitates et phantasiae, cedere coguntur nostrae; per quam sapiens dominabitur astris: imperio cuius subjecit rerum parens, quidquid coelo conclusum est.” 63 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614: “Adeoque haec astra mentis deinde pluris feci, in synpatheticis: quam Astra coelorum.” 64 64 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614: “Mohyns potentiam synpatheticam ex Astris dimanare retur, quia influentiarum aemulam. Ego vero ex propinquiori longe subject desumo. Nimirum ex Ideis ditigentibus, matre charitate, sive desiderio benevolo genitis.” 65 van Helmont, “De synpatheticis mediis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 614: “Adeoque haec astra mentis deinde pluris feci, in synpatheticis: quam Astra coelorum.”

But our archeus, whether it has a power of the earth or like unto the stars, it is all the same, rather we understand it to be particular to itself, stirring up a tempestuous blas in us, after the disobedience of our first parent. … And therefore all diseases and forms of these diseases are conceptions depicted by this invisible ruler, to carry out the storms of our calamities. Therefore in the sky of our archeus are depicted aspectual [aspectuales] ideas, as much from the depth of the starry heaven as of the soul.66

Returning to blas, we can see how these diverse faculties are interwoven in van Helmont’s natural philosophy, and thus how magic, health, and disease all participate in the same processes. In the case of disease, this power stirs up tempests. But this, too, is the demon: just as he may stir up blas in the air to form tempests, so is the body vulnerable to tempests stirred up by the demon.

This discussion of ideas is concerned entirely with sympathetic remedies rather than with the afflictions they are designed to treat, but De synpatheticis mediis also comes to bear on van Helmont’s theory of disease by presenting an argument for why physicians should treat weapon- inflicted injuries rather than leave them to the expertise of professional surgeons. This brings us back to the issue of functional impairment. In relating wounds to diseases, which he clearly states require seminal causes, he writes:

Diseases are seminal beings (except for extrinsic ones such as wounds, bruises, burns, etc.) and therefore effects of the archeus, resulting in a true action, are stirred up contingently in the error of our archeal powers, from the occasion of the cause.67

Wounds, unlike diseases broadly speaking, can in fact be conceptualized in relation to the loss of physiological function. In doing just that, van Helmont lists swords along with poisons and foods among potential occasional causes of disease: the immediate effect of a weapon-inflicted injury is the ‘death’ of a part of the body through separation (such as the putting out of an eye),

66 van Helmont, “Ortus imaginis morbosae,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 554: “Archeus autem noster, sive habeat vim terrae, vel Astris similem, perinde est, modo intelligamus ipsi proprium esse, Blas tempestuosum in nobis excitandi, post inobedientiam Protoplasti. […] Suntque idcirco omnes morbi, horumque typi, conceptus quidam depicti, ab invisibili hoc Rectore, ad perpetrandas nostrarum calamitatum procellas. In aethere ergo Archei depinguntur ideae aspectuales, tam ex profunditate stellati Coeli ipsius animae” 67 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 501: “Quod morbi sint entia seminalia (exceptis extrinsecis, vulneribus, attritu, combustion, etc.) ideoque effectus Archei, resultants in vera actione, ab occasionalibus excitantis, accidentaliter, in nostrarum potestatum Archaeli errore obnati.”

79 accompanied by functional impairment (such as the loss of sight from the loss of an eye).68 Given that van Helmont does not allow disease to be defined as a condition - and indeed he gives this case as an example for why it cannot be - he instead explains that the violent separation introduced by the blade can likewise ‘cut’ the archeus, provoking it to produce disease.69 The loss of sight, for instance, is not equivalent to the loss of an eye. In this way, the loss of function is clearly distinct from the instantiation of a disease that might follow from the rage of the archeus, which may manifest as inflammation or complications that prevent a wound from healing properly. Therefore, in spite of healing wounds and healing diseases being incommensurate tasks, the physician who treats wounds is nonetheless correcting circumstances that, by provoking the “tempests” of the archeus, can give rise to disease.70

When he established his ontology of disease, van Helmont did so in opposition to forms of privation, pointing in particular to the vital origins of disease and its participation in generative processes of growth and propagation. Indeed, Galen discussed the loss of sight under such circumstances in his De methodo medendi as an exemplar of disease as loss of function.71 Van Helmont’s rejection of this physiological basis for pathology required nosological innovation. He was firm in his assertion that the cure of disease was the primary injunction for physicians, but as we have seen, this was by no means an attempt to constrict the purview of practical medicine. Elaborating on the tempests that wounds can stir up in the archeus allowed van Helmont to fit even wounds into his disease classification, which he more clearly establishes in Ignotus hospes morbus. In this treatise, he terms wounds “instrumental diseases,” because they are “deprived of the strength of seeds” – that is, they do not participate in the same processes of generation whereby

68 van Helmont, “Suscepta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 617. Van Helmont mentions the example of the eye to indicate mechanical causes of bodily dysfunction – mechanical meaning, e.g., the cutting of a tendon or the obstruction of a passage – that do not necessarily bring about disease (although they can): “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 491. This is in contrast to a passage in De methodo medendi wherein Galen uses the same loss of sight to explicate the definition of disease (see note 71 below). 69 See also: van Helmont, “In puncto vitae subjectum inhaesionis moborum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 532: “sanitas integritatem praesupponit, quam morbus lacerat.” Disease as a ‘rending’ of the body presents a pathological relation between unity and disunity that has its expression in demonology as well; see: Anna Rosner, “The Witch Who Is Not One: The Fragmented Body in Early Modern Demonological Tracts,” Exemplaria 21, no. 4 (2009): 363-379. 70 van Helmont, “Suscepta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 617. 71 Galen, Method of Medicine, Volume I: Books 1-4, edited and translated by Ian Johnston and G. H. R. Horsley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), Book 1, Part 6, at pp. 72-79. See especially pp. 78-79: “For when we see, the eye is functioning correctly, and when we fail to see, it is the converse. We call the former health and the latter disease, or affection, or whatever you wish, for this makes no difference, at least in the present context.”

80 proper diseases establish and develop in the body.72 Wounds, which are not true entities arising from processes of generation, entail the privation of bodily activity rather than the perversion of these activities. Their capacity to cause disease is instead determined by the body’s archeus, which might respond to injury by stirring up a morbific idea. Because all manifestations of disease depend upon the imagination, we must return to its role in order to better understand how van Helmont may thereby expand the purview of the physician.

Foreign Yet Familiar

We have seen how van Helmont made disease reliant upon the body’s normal regulatory faculties, and indeed in an important sense, the body inflicts the mortal injuries of disease upon itself. The same disease then has multiple ways of coming about, all mediated by the imagination and brought into being by the body’s own archeus. This points to a tension between the strangeness of the morbific idea and its recognition in the body:

Diseases rush forth from the inclemency of heaven, by the injuries of unstable seasons [tempestates] and the unfortunate draughts of endemics, whereby a hostile guest [hostis hospes] is brought and received within, so that it may make itself familiar.73

In spite of being essentially unnatural to the body, the seminal idea of disease is compatible with the human imagination in the same way that it participates in natural processes in a pathological manner. Much as the demon presents itself as familiar – that is, recognizable – while remaining fundamentally foreign, so the disease seed is recognizable by the imagination. The power exerted by the strange ideas of disease only manifest once they have presented as familiar and become reified. Then control is wrested from the native ideas of the body.

Indeed, the capacity for the body’s vital faculties to create disease from a seed received from without suggests its capacity for disease to arise from an internal cause as well:

Diseases most manifestly come into being from perturbations or passions of the mind [anima], and by far more occultly, from the luminous perturbations of the

72 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 493: “Ut in vulneribus, morbis instrumentariis, seminum robore orbatis.” 73 van Helmont, “Butler,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538: “Prorumpunt morbi ex Coeli inclementia, injuriis instabilium tempestatum et endemicorum infaustis haustibus, quibus hostis intro adducitur, admittiturque hospes, ut familiarem se faciat.”

archeus himself, or else drawn in and arising from an occasional matter inciting them.74

The normal activities of the archeus can in fact be altered by both domestic and foreign ideas stamped (cudi) in the imagination. This power of the imagination, standing in the gap between the material and immaterial, is what allows a “being of mere reason” (merum ens rationis) to become a being in its own right, by communicating this directive to the archeus that serves as the material and efficient causes.75 As we saw in Chapter 2, the imagination can both produce abstract ideas from physical sensation and instigate the generation of physical effects from seminal ideas. Passions are able to stir up disease through the imagination, just as disease can be understood as the rage of the archeus. Even where occasional causes ensure that the needs of practical medicine are not neglected, the seminal idea remains to cement disease as an ens with a consistent distinction from and relation to the human body.76 This estrangement of disease from the body remains the case even when the morbific idea is supplied by the human faculties themselves. Van Helmont does not claim that all ideas can exercise such influence, but under specific circumstances, he assigns ideas the power to bring about diverse effects both inside and outside of the body.

As we have seen, seminal ideas supply the directive by which material bodies develop and function; these ideas account for all bodily operations in van Helmont’s theory of disease, both natural and unnatural. Van Helmont explains that ideas with bodily expression often originate as such: the archeus, for instance, has its own native ideas according to which it orchestrates the operations of the body. Likewise, the seminal idea contained in a seed of disease may enter a person’s body and proceed to direct the archeus in place of (or in addition to) its native ideas without ever acting on that person’s mental states.77 Morbific ideas can be drawn from outside the body, from human conceptions, or from the archeus himself, but the spiritual register at which these ideas are conceived by the imagination and reified by the archeus is beneath awareness.78 Thus the strange ideas of disease are foreign not because they originate solely outside of the body, but because they possess ends contrary to the nature of the body and its operations. Indeed, ideas

74 van Helmont, “Butler,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538: “Proveniunt morbi a perturbationibus, seu passionibus animi manifestissime. Et longe occultius a perturbationibus ipsius Archei luxualibus, spontaneisque, vel proritante materia occasionali haustis, ac subnatis.” Cf. “De morbis archealibus,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 548-49. 75 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538 (sig. Zzz2v). 76 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 503. 77 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 539 (sig. Zzz2r)-547, esp. p. 538 (sig. Zzz2v). 78 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 538 (sig. Zzz2v).

82 conceived by human beings can become morbific once they are stamped by the imagination onto the archeus, thereby directing the archeus to act according to the directives supplied by these foreign ideas – just as the archeus can respond to injury by becoming enraged and instantiating disease.79 In van Helmont’s natural philosophy, therefore, ideas have power in both the common meaning of the expression and in a much more literal sense.

In his treatise on the plague, van Helmont acknowledges how the implications of this theory could get out of hand. How could he ponder and write so extensively about the plague, for instance, if mere ideas of it could manifest the disease in the body?80 In fact there are different registers for the ideas conceived in the mind and the power they are capable of influencing over the body. In order to differentiate ideas that are capable of exerting influence over the body from ideas in the common use of the term, van Helmont distinguishes ideas in the conscious mind from the ideas beneath our awareness that are made powerful by the imagination. When he wrote about the plague specifically, van Helmont describes three distinct ways in which one can contract the plague: two from an external source, either a fully matured form of the disease from other infected persons or an imperfect form of the disease from corrupt exhalations of the earth; and one from an internal source, that is, from terror conceived in the imagination.81 This terror, arising from the passions, is the idea of the plague that is capable of being conceived and reified in the imagination. Van Helmont calls such passions the “internal motions of the mind” (internae animi motiones), going on to write that the “common mother of all passions is desire, for this is in itself either evil or good.”82 As we saw in Chapter 2, mental states are important in van Helmont’s theory of disease because of the role played by ideas and their conception in the imagination, but the passions have a separate role related to the power of the will. Passions move ideas to be formed, conceived, and acted upon in the imagination, in the same way that the goodwill of a physician directs medicines that operate through powers dependent upon the imagination.83 In the case of the plague, this passion is more than fear alone; it is enjoined with a fundamental belief that one has contracted the disease, which produces the distinct form of terror responsible for instantiating the disease.

79 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 539 (sig. Zzz3r) - 542. 80 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 44: “Ego partier de Peste scribens absque terrore, in pleno velle, et conceptu cogitantis animae, multa de Peste meditor: non tamen ob id hanc mini contraho.” 81 van Helmont, “Tumulus pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 68-69. 82 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 542: “Passionumque cunctarum communis mater desiderium. Hoc enim in se bonum vel malum est.” 83 van Helmont, “De ideis morbosis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 539 (sig. Zzz2r) - 547.

The violence of disease is therefore mediated by the body’s own faculties, and in particular by the powers of the human imagination, that van Helmont earlier described in relation to demonic power over the body. Indeed, in all the ways that disease is not like other natural bodies, it is like the demon. While disease may, like a bean, participate in seminal generation that frames the essences of all things in nature, it also, like the demon, possesses a corrupt nature consisting in a malevolent will that emerges in relation to human beings. In both demonological and morbific expressions of the pathological, it is the human faculties that enable these destructive ends to take root, develop, and accomplish themselves.

A Strange Guest

Van Helmont made the imagination vulnerable to the seminal ideas of disease, but in De magnetica, he made it equally susceptible to the influence of demonic forces, which points us to the demonological origins of his theory of disease.84 The functions performed by the imagination in the course of this demonic interaction are the same as those described by van Helmont when he elaborates on the conception and development of disease. Operating through the imagination, the demon makes the witch’s will his own, and thereby employs her power to accomplish his ends in tormenting humans; operating through the imagination, the disease seed makes the archeus’ will its own, and thereby employs its power to accomplish its ends in destroying the body. Just as the ideas instilled by the demon require the imagination in order to effect physical change, so does the seed producing disease. The will of the demon turns magic into witchcraft in the same way that the morbific idea turns health into disease. The imagination is the door through which the strange guest enters – a threshold for both demonic and morbific power over human life.

When Van Helmont redrew the boundaries of nature, he included things within these bounds that only acquired an unnatural classification in relation to human beings.85 This is the pathological state that manifests itself when the human faculties are confronted and overcome by an invasive element contrary to the nature of the body – a confrontation that involves the overturning of the native government and an essential loss of control over the body’s natural operations: a confrontation with the demon. This subversion of the natural human state – that is, the unnatural status of disease within the one place it was endowed to exist – is the source of this violence. The contour of this relation that delineates the natural and the unnatural in the human

84 van Helmont, “De magnetica,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 746-780. 85 van Helmont, “Progreditur ad morborum cognitionem,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 539 (sig. Zzz2r): “in naturam admissa a principiis naturalibus.”

84 body is, I argue, the expression of a demonological construction of the pathological as dependent upon such contours. It is for this reason that when van Helmont defined disease, he called it a “violent guest” (hospes violentus) – an unwelcome intruder who, lacking his own house, steals into the human body to subvert its household government.86 This violent guest was conceived in the same framework as the demon, both capable of exploiting the vulnerabilities of the imagination to impose a foreign, malevolent directive upon the body’s native faculties.

The imagination can fulfil this role in the course of the demonic-morbific interaction with the body because of its power to relate outside and in. We saw this in the previous chapter: in witchcraft, the demon’s masterful manipulation of a pre-existing desire to do harm enables him to entangle the will of the witch with his own malevolent purposes. And in fact, the demon is made superfluous to the application of this power, even as the demon provides the terms with which such mechanisms of power can be articulated. In turn, van Helmont’s theory of disease is a considerably versatile explanation of its etiology, development, and manifestation in the body. In composing this theory, he was directed by the ways in which varying concepts of disease shape varying approaches to treating them. How disease is defined, categorized, and assigned its causes and courses of development are all facets of disease theory that serve to render illness comprehensible and curable. How a physician understands illness likewise informs how they shape the patient’s understanding of their experience of illness – and in turn, how the therapy must proceed in response. Theory of disease and medical practice, for a physician like van Helmont, guide and reinforce one another and ultimately take shape together. In this way, van Helmont’s understanding of disease – and the demonological conclusions underpinning it – shaped the medical practices of physicians whose understanding of disease followed from his contributions to medicine.

The demonological concept of the pathological provided van Helmont with a bold legitimation of his medical ambitions. In setting disease apart from the body and the rest of nature, van Helmont produced a theoretical justification for engaging in proactive medical practices and, in general, for promoting an ambitious approach to knowing and exercising influence over the natural world. This ambition gave medicine a powerful injunction to intervene when illness manifested, and indeed this demonological insight reflected a different understanding of the body’s regulatory faculties, of their operation under pathological conditions, and of the best approach to reinstating health. In the remaining chapters, we will turn from van Helmont to his readers to see

86 van Helmont, “Ignotus hospes morbus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 493.

85 how his theory of disease, which carries implicitly his demonological framing of the pathological, shaped the works and work of English Helmontians.

PART III | DEPARTURES

Can any of you make a Sword, or a pair of hansom Shooes? I hope you will not therefore conclude it impossible. George Starkey

CHAPTER 4 | NATURAL BODIES, UNNATURAL DISEASES: AN HELMONTIAN CRITIQUE OF

ANATOMICAL INVESTIGATION

In the summer of 1665, near the height of an outbreak of the plague, an enterprising broadside appeared on the streets of London advertising the services of a “Society of Chymical Physitians,” committed to providing victims of the disease “Antidotes so by us prepared, at reasonable Rates, with Directions how to use them in order to Preservation, and in case of Cure.”1 For these practitioners, the outbreak provided a chance to prove the superior efficacy of chymical medicines as well as the superior ethos of the chymical physicians who chose to remain in the city and treat the citizens who could not afford to flee to the countryside.2 But the opportunity that 1665 presented was more extensive yet. The eight undersigned physicians listed their residences for interested callers, because, the broadside claims, “our Society is not yet provided (as we intend suddenly to be) of a Publick House or Colledge, with Publick Officers.” Just a year prior, the House of Commons had vetoed the new charter of the Royal College of Physicians in London (RCP), which was first established by royal charter in 1518 to issue licenses for medical practice and thereby instate some regulation – however ill-enforced – over medical practice in London.3 These chymical physicians were often self-described followers of van Helmont, whose works

1 “An Advertisement from the Society of Chymical Physicians.” (London: Printed for John Starkey, 1665). First published in: Sir Henry Thomas, "The Society of Chymical Physitians: An Echo of the Great Plague of London, 1665," in Science, Medicine and History, ed. E. Ashworth Underwood. 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 2: pp. 56-71. (See Figure 1.) Among the many studies of London’s 1665 outbreak of the plague, particularly relevant ones include: Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1985); Paul Slack, “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe: The Implications of Public Health,” Social Research 55, no. 3 (1988): 433-53; A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London's Most Deadly Year (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 275-349; and Ole Peter Grell, “Plague, Prayer, and Physic: Helmontian Medicine in Restoration England,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996). 2 See, e.g.: George Thomson, Loimologia. A consolatory advice, and some brief observations concerning the present pest (London: Printed for L. Chapman at his Shop in Exchange-ally, 1665), p. 2: “For my part, although I could enjoy my ease, pleasure, and profit in the Country, as well perhaps as any Galenist; yet I would rather chuse to loose my life, then violate in this time of extream necessity, the band of Charity towards my neighbour […] I shall rather follow heroick Helmont, who hath taught me better things.” See also: Patrick Wallis, “Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early Modern England,” The English Historical Review 121, no. 490 (2006): 1-24. 3 Harold Cook, “The Society of Chemical Physicians, the New Philosophy, and the Restoration Court,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61, no. 1 (1987), p. 64. Their original jurisdiction within a seven-mile radius of London was at least officially extended to the whole of England in 1522: PM Rattansi, “The Helmontian- Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,” Ambix 12, no. 1 (1964), p. 2.

spread in England alongside the social influence of his son.4 With the security of the RCP’s regulatory authority now called into question, Helmontian chymical medicine was perhaps as well- positioned as it ever would be to challenge the RCP’s hegemony over medical practice in London and secure a position of legitimacy.

Among the chymical physicians listed on the broadside is George Thomson, who was a particularly prolific defender of van Helmont’s medical philosophy and a self-described ‘Helmontian.’5 In 1665, he published two polemical texts attacking the RCP in defense of chymical medicine in addition to a text titled Loimologia, which detailed the plague remedies that he would have administered in accordance with the broadside’s advertisement. But more puzzling and revealing than his treatises published in 1665 is the text printed the following year, Loimotomia, subtitled The Pest Anatomized. In this treatise, Thomson provides a discursive anatomization of the disease in addition to a description of a post-mortem dissection that he performed on a plague victim, the late servant of a recovering patient. The dissection was both a confirmation of van Helmont’s theory of the plague, to which Thomson subscribed, and an investigation into the infected body that he hoped would illuminate the nature of the disease and provide insight into potential treatments. But the insight Thomson gained was perhaps deeper than anticipated: “what the Cadaver could not teach me of it self,” he writes, “was infused into me to my sad Experience.”6 This dissection was also how he contracted the plague for the third time.

Thomson dissected the body on a Friday; by Saturday night, he was experiencing symptoms of the plague’s distinctive bubonic variety. For weeks Thomson slowly convalesced, scraping by on a “Quintuple quantity” dosage of the remedies that he had recommended in Loimologia – more, he claims, than any five of his patients combined had ever taken in twenty years

4 See Fransen, Exchange of Knowledge through Translation, Chapter 3: “The Role of Francis Mercury in Disseminating the Works of His Father” (pp. 97-148). 5 For an introductory biography of George Thomson, see: Antonio Clericuzio, “George Thomson (1619- 1677),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online edition, 17 Sep. 2015 [23 Sep. 2004]), at https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27300. Although I focus here on George Thomson, there were a number of English physicians publishing work as Helmontians in this period; see, e.g., Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, pp. 57-102; 109-118; and Steffen Ducheyne, “A Preliminary Study of the Appropriation of Van Helmont's Oeuvre in Britain in Chymistry, Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” Ambix 55 (2008): 122- 135. 6 George Thomson. Loimotomia, or, The pest anatomized in these following particulars, Viz. 1. The material cause of the pest, 2. The efficient cause of the pest, 3. The subject part of the pest, 4. The signs of the pest, 5. An historical account of the dissections of a pestilential body by the author, and the consequences thereof, 6. Reflections and observations on the fore- said dissection, 7. Directions preservative and curative against the pest: together with the authors apology against the calumnies of the Galenists, and a word to Mr. Nath. Hodges, concerning his late Vindiciae medicinae. (London: Printed for Nath. Crouch at the Rose and Crowne in Exchang Ally, 1666), p. 110.

of practicing medicine.7 But he also had the help of his friend and colleague, the famed physician and chymist George Starkey.8 By this point Starkey was also suffering from the disease himself, but he nonetheless made the trek through the easternmost gate of the London wall to where Thomson then lived, carrying with him his own preparation of van Helmont’s zenexton, a therapeutic and prophylactic amulet composed primarily of the powdered remains of desiccated toads. Starkey was perhaps not so prolific a polemicist as Thomson, but he was altogether a superior pharmacist: Starkey’s zenexton, according to Thomson, accomplished a substantial part of his recovery. If the dissection provided a view into a pestilential body transformed as van Helmont’s theory suggested it would be, then Thomson’s recovery seemed to be a welcome confirmation that van Helmont’s remedies were likewise well-suited to heal the body thus affected.

It was only after Thomson seemed out of danger of relapse, however, that he was considered fit enough to hear some troubling news: two of his friends and colleagues, one of them Starkey, had contracted the plague around the same time and were by then already two weeks dead and buried, “both reposed in their Graves,” Thomson writes, “before I learned of their deaths.”9 Starkey’s demise was a particularly unfortunate one, because he managed to die of the plague the very night he provided medicines of his own preparation to Thomson, whose recovery might have otherwise proven to be an unqualified endorsement of his chymical remedies. Thomson adds somewhat bitterly that both had “left me behind to deal with those that are always supplanting and contradicting the Truth.”10 As a self-appointed standard-bearer of Helmontian medicine in London, Thomson’s task was two-fold: on the one hand, to use this dissection in service to his polemical discourse with the physicians he referred to collectively as “Galenists,” represented by the Royal College of Physicians in London, and on the other, to defend the efficacy of Helmontian chymical medicine and the soundness of Helmontian medical theory in the wake of his colleagues’ deaths.11

7 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp 80-81. Self-dosing was not unusual, nor was it unusual for such practices to take place under less pressing circumstances; chymists used all of their senses in the laboratory and early modern experimenters often treated their own bodies as sites of experiment. See: Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, “Testing Drugs and Trying Cures: Experiment and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, no. 2 (2017): 157-182. On household recipe trials, see: Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 99-123. Considering the importance of both patient confidence and physician goodwill in van Helmont’s medical philosophy, Thomson’s quintuple self-dosing raises compelling questions about the complication of these factors in the medicine’s efficacy. 8 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 85-86. 9 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 96. 10 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 96. 11 I focus here on a particular polemical exchange in which Thomson engaged, but he was a prolific writer. 90

FIGURE 4: “An Advertisement from the Society of Chymical Physitians” (1665).

Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

On Thomson’s other exchanges, and on Helmontian polemics in this context more broadly speaking, see: Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, pp. 353-398.

Thomson writes that he initially decided to perform the dissection because he was “so eager in the pursuit of Therapeutical Truth, that I was restless till I had the full view of the inward parts of a Pestilential Body.”12 Van Helmont made the knowledge and cure of diseases central to the work of the physician, and so Thomson, likewise an advocate of knowing by experience, was determined to see the internal transformations of the body under the influence of the plague. But the therapeutic benefit was questionable. The chymical remedies that Thomson prescribed himself in quintuple dosage – and the theories that justified their usage – were developed beforehand and used without any refinements following from the dissection. This would suggest that the dissection was not as illuminating as Thomson insisted. But in fact the strongest challenge to the epistemic power of anatomical investigation is voiced by Thomson himself. Before undertaking the Loimotomia dissection, he had launched a striking censure in Galeno-Pale against “vain-glorious Galenists” for wasting their time on “impertinent and superfluous Searches in stinking Carcasses, which are never able to teach you how to destroy the Rampant Diseases daily breaking violently into these living Houses.”13 Here recalling van Helmont’s “violent guest,” Thomson dismissed the value of anatomical investigation on the basis of a disease theory that he identified as uniquely Helmontian.

To reconcile Thomson’s near-deadly experiment with his disdain for anatomical investigation, it is necessary to turn to Thomson’s understanding of the plague and what he claims distinguishes the Helmontian theory of disease, which must be understood in light of his struggle for legitimacy as a medical professional. In these final chapters, I will demonstrate the far-reaching impact of van Helmont’s disease theory on the practices of physicians who adopted it. Notably, the demon will not be quite so visible in these chapters. This is not because van Helmont’s demonology is no longer relevant; rather, it is because it was no longer necessary to support the conclusions that it had made possible for van Helmont some decades prior. Thomson’s Loimotomia reveals what he understood to be distinctly Helmontian about his medicine and the degree to

12 Thomson, “To the Reader,” Loimotomia. 13 Thomson, Galeno-pale: Or, a Chymical Trial of the Galenists, That their Dross in Physick may be discovered. With the grand Abuses and Disrepute they have brought upon the whole Art of Physick and Chirurgery, in their Method touching Phlebotomy and Purgation. Their vain Curiosity in Anatomy reprehended; and their false Rule of Contraries in the Cure of Diseases manifested. Also, a full Answer to the Objections charged by the Galenists against the Chymists, and Chymical Medicines vindicated. To which is added an Appendix, De Litho-Colo: or, An History of Three large Stones excluded the Colon by Chymical Remedies. (London: Printed by R. Wood, for Edward Thomas, at the Adam and Eve in Little Brittain, 1665), p. 29. On dissection and the place of anatomical knowledge in this period, see: Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1995).

which it was compatible with anatomical modes of investigation, as well as how van Helmont’s theory of disease – carrying with it the framework established by his demonology – could be used as a basis of authority for alternative medical practices in late-seventeenth-century England.

A True Disciple of Helmont Thomson, who was accurately accused of being a “Doctor by Purchase,” exemplifies the ambition of the medical practitioners that van Helmont’s work empowered to study and practice outside of the universities. Thomson fumbles in the arena of published polemics, often volunteering information that his opponents easily incorporate into their retorts, and his lack of confidence as a chymist leads him to consistently defer to van Helmont’s textual authority. But the middle ground he occupies – sincere and assertive yet unsure and somewhat unskilled – provides unique insights into the practice of a physician who was not only a follower of van Helmont but transparently a reader of van Helmont. Thomson made van Helmont’s reputation central to the fashioning of his own.

Thomson’s reliance on the reputation of van Helmont stems partly from the difficulty of legitimating medical practice outside of the RCP. Like other chymical physicians, Thomson filled pages of his polemical works with protests against traditional physic, but as a result he often found himself associated with the unlearned ‘pseudo-chymists’ that likewise practiced in defiance of academic medicine.14 In his treatises published in the mid-1660s, he insists in his defense that he had been practicing medicine for twenty years only after first familiarizing himself with both Galenic and chymical medicine, claiming like many others that he determined the latter to be superior from the advantage of knowing both.15 In fact the Annals of the RCP record that twenty

14 Henry Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation to the Sweating-Sickness Examined, in a Reply to George Thomson, Pretender to Physick and Chymistry: Together with a Defence of Phlebotomy in General, and Also Particularly in the Plague, Small- Pox, Scurvey, and Pleurisie, in Opposition to the Same Author, and the Author of Medela Medicinæ, Doctor Whitaker, and Doctor Sydenham … (London: Printed for Phil. Brigs, 1671), sig. A2r-A2v; Thomson had previously admitted to buying his doctoral diploma in Loimotomia, p. 177: “Then desiring to do all things … decently, and in order, I purchased a Doctoral Diploma to justifie my Practice legally in any place of the world; which I would rather burn, than not be worthy.” Thomson often and at length complains about being associated with ‘pseudo-chymists,’ e.g., Loimotomia, pp. 181-85: “I confesse I am not a little ashamed, when I hear of, and am twitted with the great abuses in Chymistry, committed by some of those, who have been thought stout defenders of the same.” See also: Harold Cook, “Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians.” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 1 (1994): 1-31. Alchemy and the medicine associated with it also nonetheless held the interest of elites; see: Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. pp. 73-95. 15 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 176-77: “yet unwilling to forsake the old beaten Road of the Antients, I did not presently subscribe rashly to that, to which I was forced afterwards by degrees to grant ipso facto to be truth” Cf. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, pp. 17-39 on the diverse paths taken by early modern practitioners to learn chymistry (or alchemy).

years prior, in the winter of 1647/8, Thomson had attempted their examination for licensure.16 In a span of just three months, he was examined twice and deferred once before purchasing a doctoral degree from Leiden, taking up chymical medicine, and embarking on his long-running campaign against the RCP. In 1672, however, Thomson volunteered a slightly different account of how he came to buy his doctoral degree after first failing to secure licensure from the RCP.17 There, still engaged in polemical exchanges with members of the RCP, Thomson relates an extraordinary story involving self-directed study of medicine begun straight out of the common schools; an attempt to travel to Oxford diverted by the military forces of the Earl of Essex; and a subsequent period spent imprisoned by the forces of Parliament. Upon afterwards submitting himself to the examination, having by his own account been purely self-taught in medicine, Thomson claims he was offered licensure that he refused on the grounds of its exorbitant fees – and thence to Leiden. In light of this, it is perhaps not so surprising that he positions himself in opposition to the RCP ‘Galenists’ who, he complained, “whisper behind my back, that I am no Schollar; because that I have not spent my time altogether like themselves, a company of Pedants.”18 Thomson defended van Helmont’s works always in service to his own struggle for legitimacy as a physician – and indeed one who had perhaps looked for professional byways after failing to meet the academic standards of traditional physic.

Thomson’s struggle for legitimacy was only a small part of the broader power struggle taking place among medical practitioners in London. The chymical physicians among whom Thomson numbered himself denied the legitimacy of the medical practices endorsed by the RCP, and so predictably they were in turn denied the licensure necessary to legally practice medicine in London. By signing his name to the aforementioned broadside, Thomson was making another move in this ongoing controversy arising from tensions between the regulatory pressures of the RCP in London and the heterodox work of chymical physicians who practiced there without licensure and often without formal education. By the time this broadside appeared in 1665, their efforts to establish themselves in an official capacity were already in motion. Earlier the same year,

16 Annals Vol. III, 3 Dec 1647; 7 Jan 1647/8; 4 Feb 1647/8, MS4144, Royal College of Physicians of London. 17 George Thomson, A letter sent to Mr. Henry Stubbe on which animadversions are made by Geo. Thomson, Dr. of physick; by whom is added a vindication of his stomach-essence, or alexi-stomachon and other really-powerful remedies, from the malicious slanders and active ignorance of the Galenists (London: Printed for Nath. Crouch, 1672), pp. 4-5. 18 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 173-74.

a physician named Thomas O’Dowde fronted an attempt to obtain a charter for their rival society.19 O’Dowde’s initiative was undersigned by a hodgepodge of medical practitioners that RCP physicians broadly recognized as ‘empiricks’ and mountebanks, but even the society itself was not wholly convinced that all of its members were legitimate physicians.20 Rather, members of the briefly extant Society of Chymical Physitians were often moved to accuse one another of charlatanism.

Thomson freely admits in Loimotomia that he and many other legitimate physicians sometimes found themselves in unsavory company, often as a direct result of these ongoing efforts to organize a community of chymical physicians.21 Even O’Dowde, the Society of Chymical Physitians’ founding member, was not above suspicion; in fact Thomson and the RCP were in league of opinion concerning his questionable medical credentials.22 Although Thomson joined his name to the others listed, his professional opinion of O’Dowde would degrade with the Society’s prospects as the group fragmented. O’Dowde leveraged his connections in court, but so did his adversaries in the RCP, who made unveiled accusations regarding the political implications of these attempts to establish an autonomous society for chymical medicine in Restoration England: “out of your Anarchical Principle, you are as ready to renounce all Order and Government in the State; Your designe is to subvert, what the Lawes of England, and the Customes and Priviledges of both Universities have Established.”23 To add injury to insult, by the

19 Thomas O’Dowde, The Poor Man's Physician, Or The True Art of Medicine, as it is Chymically Prepared and Administred, for Healing the Several Diseases Incident to Mankind: The Third Edition (F. Smith, at the Elephant and Castle without Temple-Bar, 1665); Cook, “The Society of Chymical Physicians,” p. 67 20 Cook notes that the physicians who signed the membership petition “appear to have lacked much in common”: “The Society of Chemical Physicians,” p. 71. 21 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 178-79: “They upbraid me, That I frequently meet and join with an illiterate Rabble, Gunsmiths, Heel-makers and Botchers, that Rail against the Universities, and all Learning in general. This I confess ingenuously is the worst they can say of me: That once I did for a time associate my self … with several Unlearned, Unexperimented Pretenders thereto; who, not invited, but intruded themselves impudently among us: But … I strait withdrew, and washed my hands of such Dirty Companions: And when ever after it was my Chance to come into any of their Company singly, I sharply Reproved them for their bitter Invectives against Learning.” 22 George Thomson, Misochymia Elenchos, or, A Check given to the insolent Garrulity of Henry Stubbe: In Vindication of my Lord Bacon, and the Author; With an Assertion of Experimental Philosophy: Also Some Practical Observations exhibited for the Credit of the true Chymical Science. Lastly, A brief Contest between the Thomsons and the Merrets, who are the best Physicians. (London: Printed for Nat. Crouch, 1671), pp. 7-8. 23 William Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, or, Some Brief Animadversions Upon Two Late Treatises: One of Master George Thomsons, Entituled Galeno-Pale, the Other of Master Thomas O'dowdes, Called the Poor Mans Physitian: With a Short Appendix Relating to the Company of Apothecaries (London: Printed by T. Mabb for Henry Brome, 1665), p. 12- 13. Thomson’s reply is in Loimotomia, p. 173: “The principal Design of the Galenists, is to weaken the sinews of Truth, by scandalously and falsly disparaging my Person, calling me Fanatick, one of an Anarchical Principle; who have always (as my friends can testifie) been Loyal to my Soveraign.” See also: Cook, “The Society of Chemical Physicians,” pp. 74-75, where he discusses the audience at which O’Dowde’s petition 95

close of 1665 many chymical physicians felt the consequences of their determination to remain in London, where among others O’Dowde contracted the plague and died. Buckling under fire from the RCP as well as from internal accusations of charlatanism, the incipient Society of Chymical Physitians would soon dissipate.

But Thomson’s Helmontian agenda was not married to the prospects of this short-lived society. The greater part of his 1666 Loimotomia is dedicated to renewed vitriol against the physicians who continued to deny the legitimacy of his medical practice. Neither was this the first time he had confronted Galenists on the grounds of anatomical investigation specifically. After Thomson fell ill, he may have recalled a challenge he had issued earlier that year in Loimologia:

Yea, and because they boast they are such excellent Anatomists, we will dissect together a Pestilential body, that they may (if they can) inform me better where the subject of that Disease is: and for Prevention and Caution, they shall take their Preservatives and Sanatives, and I mine; and then let the world judge whom God favours most, and who fares best.24

Before the Loimotomia dissection was ever conducted, Thomson had conceived of such an experiment as a demonstration of the superiority of Helmontian medicine over the Galenic medicine to which he opposed it, moreover implying that when physicians resort to anatomy, they search for diseases using a method incapable of revealing them. In so doing, he was drawing on a dichotomy already established by van Helmont in order to support his bid for professional legitimation.

When Thomson describes the trajectory of his medical career, he is careful to emphasize that he took up chymical medicine only after he had gained a thorough understanding of both chymical and Galenic medicine and deemed the latter inferior. In his first printed treatise, Thomson explicitly traces this opposition to Galen to van Helmont’s example:

Helmont hath made [Galen] appear altogether blinde in the true Fundamentals of Nature, not knowing aright the Quiddity or Essence of a Disease, the Cause, the immediate Subject, or place thereof, nor the direct and perfect Cure of it.25

was considered around March/April 1665, and the attendant accusations of “political subversion.” Cf. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, pp. 84-87. 24 Thomson, Loimologia, pp. 10-11. 25 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 36.

Of course, this dichotomy was not so clearly expressed in the practices of the day. Just as charlatans and ‘true’ chymical physicians could be difficult to distinguish, RCP physicians also ranked among those who utilized chymical medicines, calling into question what could be considered an authentically Helmontian approach. Indeed, this first polemical text from Thomson, Galeno-Pale, was answered the same year by William Johnson, the chymist then employed by the RCP. In his Agyrto-Mastix, Johnson likewise invokes van Helmont in support of his claim that the two are not only reconcilable, but in fact that Helmontian chemical medicine is predicated on Galenic physic, claiming that van Helmont himself would readily admit as much.26 Johnson insists that an understanding of Galen is prerequisite to properly understanding and utilizing van Helmont’s medicine – which indeed reflects his professional interests. Johnson was the chymist employed by the RCP to supply their physicians with chymical medicines, which had been part of the official pharmacopoeia since 1618.27 As we have seen, van Helmont was clear about his disdain for Galen, in spite of whatever debt he doubtless owed to his education at Louvain.28 Nevertheless, in practice the chymical medicines he promoted were utilized by physicians on both sides of this conflict in London. Thomson instead distinguished himself as a true Helmontian by appealing to the medical theories that originally framed van Helmont’s medicines.

In Johnson’s response to Galen-Pale, he does not exaggerate when he complains that “ther is hardly a page in [Thomson’s] whole book but what is fill'd with some abusive Language or other,” often at the expense of clarity (and certainly of brevity).29 The contradictions, including Thomson’s seemingly ambivalent view of anatomy, are also conspicuous. Johnson notes that “he both magnifies, and cryes down in one breath” the value of anatomical investigation.30 To him Thomson’s critique of anatomy is senseless: “Did ever any Sober Man find fault with Industry imploy'd in Anatomical Dissections? Who ever imagin'd it possible for a man to be a Good

26 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 3: “Vanhelmont himself will own, that he was Assisted by [Galen] in his further prospect.” As Debus notes, Johnson had some authority as the author of a Lexicon Chymicum, which Debus describes as “one of the most authoritative chemical dictionaries of the period”: Chemistry and Medical Debate, pp. 94-95. Cf. William Johnson, Lexicon Chymicum, Cum Obscuriorum Verborum, et Rerum Hermeticarum, Tum Phrasium Paracelsicarum …, 2 Vols. (London, 1652-1653). 27 George Urdang, “How Chemicals Entered the Official Pharmacopoeias,” Archives internationales d’histoire des Sciences 7 (1954): 303-14. Cited in: Rattansi, “The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,”p. 4. Johnson’s duties are sometimes referenced in the Annals, e.g., Vol. IV, 2 April 1651, MS4145, Royal College of Physicians of London. 28 For instance: van Helmont, “Physica Aristotelis et Galeni Ignara,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 51: “Ego sane reperio Galenum, opinionum sedulum, et iactantiosum descriptorem sine judicio, vel discretion. Neque enim de Natura, morbis, causis, atque defectibus, Melius sensisse, quam de placitis Hippocrates et Platonis.” 29 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 25 30 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 27

Physitian, without great Skill and Judgement in the subject of this Art; and most Diseases proceeding from Internal Causes, what way to be taken for the discovery of them, but Anatomy?”31 But Thomson’s critique is both more and less nuanced than Johnson claims. He agrees that a physician should be made familiar with physiology through anatomical dissection, and even insists that chirurgy should be undertaken by physicians rather than delegated to professional barber- surgeons. But these are distinct ways of taking a knife to the body: on the one hand didactic, on the other therapeutic. Thomson’s accusation is more specific; he claims that Galenic physicians place too much emphasis on the epistemic power of anatomical investigation and that they fail to recognize what particular value anatomical investigation is capable of offering.

This critique in fact follows one appearing in van Helmont’s works, in which he traces his disavowal of anatomical investigation to his experiences in academia. When he was seventeen, van Helmont was appointed as a lecturer of chirurgy at Louvain, where he taught the texts he had mastered as a student.32 He later marveled that he had lectured purely from the book when the subject demanded hands-on experience. For all that van Helmont disdained anatomists, chirurgical pedagogy was nonetheless fundamental to therapeutics and therefore indispensable to medical practice. Rather, van Helmont critiqued anatomists for too far extending the epistemic ambitions of their discipline. A mature van Helmont would disdain the “trifles” sought by anatomists who wasted their time inflicting their curiosities on vivisected dogs.33 Instead, he demanded these practices to be justified by demonstrable insight into the nature of disease. Thus when he called into question the epistemic power of anatomical investigation, van Helmont was once again pointing to the cure of diseases as the primary mandate of the physician and the primary subject of medical epistemology.34

Nevertheless, van Helmont mentions many dissections that he performed during his career, insisting as Thomson later would that they were justified by their potential benefit for therapeutics. In fact in van Helmont’s Tumulus pestis, he too describes a dissection of a pestilential body.35 Like Thomson’s dissection, this interest in opening the infected body was distinct from the demonstrations in the anatomical theater. With the focus on disease, anatomical investigation in this context turned to diseased bodies. The apparent paradox in Loimotomia is thus shared by

31 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, pp. 25-26 32 van Helmont, “Tumulus Pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 13-14. 33 van Helmont, “Catarrhi Deliramenta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 442. 34 van Helmont, “Praefatio,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 485-486. 35 van Helmont, “Tumulus Pestis,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 21-22: “Curiositatis ergo, cum Anatomicus deficeret, diffecui eum, ac inveni os stomachi, eschara nigra jam cauterizatum.”

van Helmont and is merely apparent: their rejection is not a dismissal of anatomical inquiry as an aid to medicine, but of the exaggeration of its epistemic power, especially when the focus was not on the nature and treatment of diseases. These are the distinctions that set apart Thomson’s view of anatomy and with it what he understood to be the proper medical ethos of the “true disciples of Helmont,” on the basis of which he launched his censure of academic medicine.36

The Plague Anatomized

Thomson’s description of the Loimotomia dissection – which comprises only six pages out of nearly two hundred – is prefaced by four chapters dedicated to medical theory detailing the plague’s material causes, its efficient and formal causes, its locus in the body, and its diagnostic signs, all of which draw from van Helmont’s causal classifications of disease (see Figure 5). After detailing the dissection and the circumstances of his illness, Thomson then offers his commentary on what he observed in the dissected body before finally detailing his remedies. Much in keeping with the preceding chapters, the dissection itself primarily offered a visceral confirmation of an already mature Helmontian interpretation of how the plague should manifest somatically. For this reason, Thomson’s explication of his observations during the dissection should be read in view of his understanding of the disease, which he describes in the opening chapter:

From the Name, I pass to the Essence or Quidditiy of the Pest; which is a Contagious Disease, for the most part very acute, arising from a certain peculiar, venemous Gas, or subtile Poyson, generated within, or entering into us from without: at the access, or bare apprehension of which, the archeus is put into a Terror, and forthwith submitting to the aforesaid Poyson, invests it with part of its own substance, delineating therein the perfect Idea or Image of this special kind of Sickness distinct from any other.37

Following van Helmont’s theory of seminal disease, Thomson describes the plague as arising from an air-born ‘poison’ or material vector that engenders the disease proper inside the body. There, the disease seed carried by the air impresses an image of terror in the imagination. Once conceived by the imagination, the disease seed is capable of disturbing the normal functions of the archeus, the vital spirit responsible for regulating the body’s normal operations.38 Yielding to the mortal

36 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 179. 37 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 8. 38 Cf. Marsilio Ficino, Consilio 1r-4v; Teodoro Katinis, “A Humanist Confronts the Plague: Ficino's Consilio contro la Pestilentia,” MLN, 125, no. 1 (2010), p. 75.

threat of the plague, the archeus is subjugated by its foreign directive and thereby becomes its instrument in the body, which it proceeds to destroy in accordance with the specific disease.

FIGURE 5: Loimotomia, showing the title page with table of contents and the frontispiece, which depicts the dissection that is the subject of the book. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

This disease theory does not strongly recommend the utility of anatomical investigation, which cannot grant the senses access to these processes. But Thomson may have been motivated nonetheless to look within the body for signs of the plague precisely because of its lack of distinctive symptoms. Thomson does attempt to compile a list of symptoms that allow a physician to “confidently assert, That the sick man hath a Pestilential poyson within him,” but the list is so extensive that it mostly highlights how elusive the disease could be:

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an Oppression about the Praecordia, a Loathing, Vomiting, a Vertigo, great pain of the Head, a notable redness in the veins of the conjunctive Tunicle, difficult or irregular Respiration, a great asperity of the Tongue, extream Thirst, or no Thirst considerable; a Soporous, or Lethargical Disposition, Agrypnie, Restlessness and Inquietude, a Misapprehension, false Conception of things; a delirium or raving, a Faintness, Palpitation of the Heart, and Lipothymie; a Stupor and Numness in several parts, Spontaneous Trembling, Lassitude, alternate changes of heat and cold, shooting pains especially in the Emunctories, Eruption of Blanes, Vesicles, Spots, Botches, Carbuncles, an obscure or manifest Feaver, sometimes violent, sometimes gentle, the pulse weak, unequal, intermitting, formicant, or vermiculant; a laudable well-coloured Urine, not at all discovering any evil affect …39

The problem, as Thomson notes, is that so many symptoms of the plague are shared with other diseases – or even indistinguishable from a state of health. But he still promoted his own ability to recognize the plague at a treatable stage in its development by virtue of his familiarity with the disease – a deferral to expertise that (we shall see) came to characterize the epistemology of chymical medicine. In this passage, Thomson’s self-promotion through claims to expertise was expressed in his reiterative emphasis on active engagement with treating disease and hands-on experience, both clinical and personal. Nevertheless, he finally concedes that “in short, any sudden Alteration arising in us in time of Contagion, and no solid Reason to be given for it” may indicate infection.40 The symptoms were not distinctive, eliding any indication of the specific nature of the plague itself. Instead, it might have been his hope that the dissected body would present signs indicative of the plague’s specific nature.

There is little novelty in Thomson’s observations from the dissection. When he opened the body in search of the plague’s distinctive signs, Thomson viewed it as a Helmontian would, relying on van Helmont’s theory of disease to guide his understanding of the body’s pathological transformations. In turn, the dissection served as a demonstrative confirmation of the medical theory with which he justified his practice. Thus Thomson’s decision to perform a dissection on a pestilential body may have been motivated by his Helmontian focus on disease or even by van Helmont’s own example, and indeed the dissection seems to have been unusual enough to attract

39 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 58-59. Note the many dichotomies in this list, which also includes the lack of symptoms as a symptom of the disease. 40 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 63.

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censure from other physicians.41 He mentions that he was upbraided by Galenists for performing the dissection, but likewise indicates vaguely that, among his detractors, “one of their own Sect” had assisted in a similar undertaking and “upon the like Occasion lost his life.”42 There were either many physicians dissecting pestilential bodies in London, or many rumors inspired by the dissection conducted by Thomson. Indeed while drafting Loimotomia, Thomson may have noted that Johnson himself was rumored to have met his end in August of 1665 after assisting Samuel Pepys’ personal physician (Alexander Burnett) with the dissection of a pestilential body:

Dr Burnett, Dr Glover, and one or two more of the College of Physicians, with Dr O’Dowd, who was licensed by my lord’s grace of Canterbury, some surgeons, apothecaries, and Johnson the chemist, died all very suddenly. Some say (but God forbid that I should report it for truth) that these, in a consultation together, if not all, yet the greatest part of them, attempted to open a dead corpse that was full of the tokens, and being in hand with the dissected body, some fell down immediately, and others did not outlive the next day at noon.43

It may seem odd that O’Dowde and Johnson were performing a post-mortem together, but false rumors of such dissections were widespread. Thomson himself was also rumored to have died assisting Burnett, and he even takes efforts in Loimotomia to put to rest suspicions that Starkey had died only after assisting him with his dissection. Thomson insists at length that he performed the dissection alone in the presence of a single manservant, whose opinions he often solicited during the procedure.44 In doing so he addresses these rumors like accusations, speculating that they were promulgated to paint his colleagues as reckless and unmindful of the threat of contagion.45 But he had reasons to believe that the undertaking was not as dangerous as might be assumed.

41 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 131: “I am commonly Censured by the Galenists presumptuous, in venturing to open this Contagious Body, for no other Reason (as I can conceive) but that I escaped so great a danger contrary to their expectation” 42 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 103. 43 Quoted “From the subjoined statement, contained in a letter from Tellison to Dr Sancroft” from the entry for Alexander Burnett in: William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol. 1: 1518 to 1700 (London: Royal College of Physicians of London, 1878), p. 334. Samuel Pepys’ comment reads: “This day I am told that Dr. Burnett my physician is this morning dead of the plague – which is strange, his man dying so long ago, and his house this month open again. Now himself dead – poor unfortunate man.” Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 6: 1665, eds. Robert Latham and William G. Matthews (London: Harper Collins, 1971), p. 203. The annotations to Samuel Pepys’ diary entry (edition cited) include reports that Thomson also died assisting with this dissection. 44 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 103-105. 45 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 103.

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Thomson claims to have moved extensively among the infected in London, contacting various “abominable, loathsom, noysom Smells, from Sores, Carbuncles, the tainting Respiration, and faetide Expiration of numerous living bodies” without yet succumbing to the disease.46 Just as Starkey must have braved actively infected areas of London to bring Thomson his crucial remedies, Thomson and his colleagues regularly encountered the disease under conditions they considered sufficiently controlled to prevent infection. Thomson understood the plague to be communicated for the most part by air-born “atoms” carrying the seeds of disease, in which case he would be mostly concerned with corrupted air. For this reason he conducted the dissection outdoors in an adjacent garden, where the body was placed above the purifying fumes of a sulfur- filled brazier. It is also worth noting that Thomson would consider the body to be less contagious than living bodies, which propagated corrupted air through respiration. Thomson estimates that he was ten times less likely to contract the disease under such circumstances, and indeed in retrospect he maintains that it was doubtful that these pestilential atoms entered his body via respiration as they usually would.47

Nonetheless, Thomson had the privilege of both treating and contracting the plague more than once during its outbreak in London, and by this third infection, he considered himself sufficiently experienced to speculate on how he may have contracted it. After finishing the dissection, Thomson noticed that he was experiencing a loss of sensation in one of his hands, which had been bare throughout the investigation. In this he says “I was a little careless,” but he was not concerned with the possibility that leaving his hands bare would facilitate the communication of pestilential fluids to his mouth or other vulnerable parts of his body. Instead he considers only afterwards that the atoms carrying the disease seeds could pass through the pores of his skin.48 When he realized that he was losing sensation in his hand, Thomson was suddenly wary of the potential for infection. He held his hand over fuming sulfur to cleanse the corruption, but the infection had already taken root.49 The residual heat of the body, he writes, had in fact dilated the pores of his hand and allowed atoms carrying the disease seed to enter his hand. Elaborating on van Helmont’s theory of disease, Thomson strongly associates the disease seed with its material vector, but his focus remains on the seminal idea as the morbific agent.

46 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 132. 47 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 132. 48 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 131. 49 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 78.

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Once the atoms had passed through the skin, the disease itself could only arise once the seminal idea of the plague had been imprinted in the imagination and fully realized through the power of the archeus: “As this Stamp, Figure, Idea or Character doth Page direct the Archeus, so it begins, proceeds, and at last concludes, according as the impression lasteth.”50 Once conceived in the imagination, the disease seed could subjugate the central archeus through the impression of an image of mortal terror, whereby the central archeus is then conscripted to the generation of the disease itself. This was also how the plague was understood to arise internally from a strong conception of the disease, just as van Helmont described in the case of other systemic illnesses such as asthma and epilepsy – and likewise how those of a particularly strong constitution could contact contagious air or substances without falling ill. But Thomson’s use of Helmontian disease theory was never far from his vested interest in the ongoing conflict between Galenic and chymical physicians, and in fact this central role of the imagination was in turn a markedly Helmontian basis for many of the rebukes that Thomson leveled at his Galenic detractors.

One explanation for why Thomson exhibits such confidence in his safety from the plague – aside from reckless self-promotion – is related to why he rebukes Galenists for fleeing the city.51 In both cases he was crucially concerned with terror. In van Helmont’s disease theory, terror was made central to the contraction and development of the plague, and confidence likewise crucial for treating (or preventing) infection. A preliminary example can be taken from Thomson’s critique of quarantine practices. It was official mandate for houses to be locked, marked, and guarded when a resident showed signs of infection, but physicians of all kinds insisted that quarantine at home potentially did more harm than good.52 Physicians commonly cited the importance of patient confidence for the efficacy of medicine, which quarantine did not inspire. Many physicians also questioned whether or not such quarantine procedures were truly effective at preventing spread of the disease, especially since they often resulted in healthy individuals being locked inside with the infected.53 In addition to ethical and economic objections, Thomson insisted

50 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 31-32. 51 For this rebuke, see: Thomson, Loimologia, pp. 1-2. 52 Plague orders issued in 1666 mandate that the infected be removed to pest-houses while the rest of the household “be shut up for fourty days, and have a Red Cross, and Lord have mercy upon us, in Capital Letters affixed on the door, and Warders appointed, as well to find them necessaries, as to keep them from conversing with the sound.” See: Rules and Orders To be observed by all Justices of Peace, Mayors, Bayliffs, and other Officers, for prevention of the spreading of the Infection of the Plague. Published by His Majesties special Command (London: John Bill and Christopher Barker, 1666). In this, the 1666 plague orders were nearly identical with earlier London orders, which mandated that affected households be shut for a month, marked, and guarded by wardsmen: Orders Conceived and Published by The Lord Major and Alderman of the City of London, concerning the Infection of the Plague (London: James Flesher), sig. A4v-A4r. See: Slack, Impact of the Plague, pp. 207-226. 53 Slack notes that plague orders could not be enforced reliably with limited resources and manpower at the 104

that locking the infected into their homes actually increased the virulence of the disease through the spread of terror:

[It] might be more conducible to the body Politick and Natural, if this rigid course of enclosing the Infected so strictly within so narrow a compass were mitigated: for hereby intercourse of Trading might be kept alive, and so miserable Poverty prevented, which hath always an Equipage and Train of sad Calamities and Plagues attending upon it; and magnanimity and undauntedness of spirit procured, which questionless would in some measure both exclude and master this Pestilential Poison. Certainly none but such an Heathen as Galen would have given his disciples such impious and uncharitable Advice, as to leave poor distressed wretches to a Lord have mercy on them, when their presence ought to comfort, and their Medicines (if they had them) to heal their grievous sore 54

His objections here were similar to those he leveled at physicians who fled the city during the outbreak. Rather than merely insisting that confidence fostered health, Thomson, following van Helmont, directly connected the normal functions of the body to the vital archaeal spirits, which in turn were subject to perturbations of the passions – in this case a mortal fear of the plague, which was notoriously deadly. In the Helmontian theory of the plague, terror was fully pathologized and indeed demonized.

In Loimotomia, Thomson makes clear as early as the dedicatory letter that terror is central to understanding how the plague was contracted, just as van Helmont had insisted. There, he writes in praise of a nobleman - William, Earl of Craven - who was one of the few people of means that remained in the city during the epidemic. But beyond the material aid provided by the Earl, Thomson thanks him for the benefit of his mere presence in the city, invoking a familiar interpretation of how the plague was contracted:

Certainly, the presence of your Person, hath been a means to counterpoise the evil effects of fugitive Physicians; so that many probably have evaded the fury of the late Pest, through a strong Imagination that it was not so Contagious and Mortal

height of an outbreak such as that of 1665 in London. Slack writes that isolation orders – and orders against assembly, including funeral gatherings – were routinely ignored, and that doing so was in part justifiable on the grounds that plague orders defied principles of Christian charity. See: Slack, “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe,” pp. 443-446. 54 Thomson, Loimologia, pp. 9-10.

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(as was conceived) because a Person of your Dignity did dare to tarry here when it was most outragious.55

With most physicians attending to their noble patrons outside of London, Thomson saw the threat of the plague exacerbated - not for want of Galenic expertise, which by then he held in low esteem, but for the fear inevitably sparked by the exodus of so many wealthy families and physicians.56 Knowing that the Earl chose to remain in the city may have been reassuring for the many who could not afford to leave, and in Thomson’s view this emboldened attitude strengthened the body against infection “through a strong Imagination.” Just as it was the point of entry for the disease, the imagination thus bolstered could resist the malignant directives of the disease seed. And in crucial ways, this theory also placed the disease, like the imagination itself, beyond view of the anatomist.

One must question, then, what Thomson found so illuminating about what he uncovered in the Loimotomia dissection. Upon opening the body of a plague victim, one would find, as he discovered for himself, myriad signs of disease: a “black matter like Ink” in the stomach, arteries “stuffed with a thick curdled blackish substance,” or perhaps a “livid Ichorous matter” in the spleen.57 It may not be obvious that these fluids indicate the terror that Thomson insisted gave rise to such pathological transformations. But in van Helmont’s theory of disease, all of the fluids here would be significant indications of a systemic illness such as the plague. Recalling van Helmont’s Duumvirate – the dual government of stomach and spleen – Thomson looked for the signs of corruption in the locus of the central archeus and the sensitive soul, of which the imagination was a part. There, the central archeus enacted directives from the sensitive soul to regulate the localized fermentations that normally ensured the proper functioning of the body, and it was thus the locus for systemic illnesses like the plague. Because the vital spirits responsible for regulating somatic functions were seated in the blood, corrupted fluid in the arteries would also be an anticipated find. Thomson’s interpretation of what he found transformed in the pestilential body was markedly chymical, and his focus was entirely upon the parts of the body in which, according to van Helmont, the signs of the plague should be the most apparent. Ultimately he insists, in accordance with this understanding of the plague, that he might have avoided

55 Thomson, “To the Truly Honourable, William Earl of Craven, Vicount of Ovington, and Baron of Hampsted Marshall,” in Loimotomia. 56 Slack notes that the flight of wealthy citizens from infected cities was also the concern of government officials, who were concerned both with the immediate economic impact and with qualification for outside aid, which was often provided on the condition that infected communities remain isolated: Slack, “Responses to Plague in Early Modern Europe,” pp. 440-443. 57 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 71-77.

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infection entirely “had I strengthned the Archeus of my hand with some appropriate Balsamick Spirit, and filled up the Pores with an oleaginous odorous matter” – guarding against both the ingress of the atoms and the impression of the disease’s seminal idea.58

Natural Bodies, Unnatural Diseases

When Thomson describes his struggle to cure himself of the plague, he claims that “my whole scope was to keep up the strength of the vital spirits, without which I am sure no Maladie can be cured.”59 It was not a novelty in medicine to recommend invigorating spirits to bolster the body’s vital spirits and promote health, and wine was a traditional favorite in the remedies that van Helmont recommended (Thomson additionally recommends “strong Beer or Ale well brewed”).60 In van Helmont’s treatise on the plague, wine features prominently because of these benefits to the archeus. Given that van Helmont described the plague as operating through an invasive image of terror, it should not surprise that Helmontian remedies for the plague emphasized such efforts to keep the spirits lifted. But terror itself was also central to the operation of at least one of van Helmont’s plague remedies. Here we must return to Starkey’s toads.

Many novel remedies arose with chymical medical practice, but zenexton was a rather longstanding remedy for the plague that van Helmont instead reframed in his theory of disease.61 By Thomson’s day, zenexton had acquired a close association with van Helmont’s works, although the association was often seen as a strike against Helmontian credibility. Indeed, this is clearly demonstrated in a letter written to Henry Oldenburg in 1670: “I love not that horrible barbarous Paracelsical choaking word of Zenexton, fit for no mouth but a Mountebanke, nor any eares but

58 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 131. 59 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 85-86. 60 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 85: “things that abound with noble Spirits, as good Wine, and strong Beer or Ale well brewed.” Thomson emphasizes the deleterious effect of drinking weak alcohol (“small beer”) as an explanation for Starkey’s death in spite of his access to chymical medicines: Loimotomia, pp. 100-101. See also: Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 203-208, wherein Newman discusses the circumstances of Starkey’s death in light of Thomson’s Loimotomia. For van Helmont’s wine-based remedies, see: van Helmont, “Tumulus Pestis,” Opuscula medica inauditia, p. 69. And for an earlier example: Ficino, Consilio, 48v: “Debbesi viver lieto, perché la letitia fortifica lo spirito vitale,” quoted in: Katinis, “A Humanist Confronts the Plague,” p. 79. Wine-based remedies were common; see, for instance, Jouanna, “Wine and Medicine in Ancient Greece,” in Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen, pp. 173-194; and the whole of Ficino’s great medical opus: Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. and ed. by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998). 61 Martha Baldwin provides a survey of the history of zenexton (or xenexton) alongside other amulets used as remedies for the plague in: "Toads and Plague: Amulet Therapy in Seventeenth-Century Medicine." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 67, no. 2 (1993): 227-47.

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those [of van Helmont’s] silly amazed Auditors.”62 This execration was written by Israel Tonge, who had traveled on behalf of the Royal Society of London to investigate reports of combats between spiders and toads in the English countryside. His report, in which he speculates on the causes and implications of these widely witnessed melees, reveals some interesting features of this toad-based remedy and the manner in which van Helmont’s formulation was uniquely reliant upon his theory of disease. In spite of zenexton’s mixed reputation, there did exist within van Helmont’s works a sophisticated explanation for its efficacy.

Van Helmont uses the term zenexton to refer to various amulets made with gems or precious metals that could be used as prophylactics against the plague, but he recommends most highly the zenexton made from the powdered remains of desiccated toads.63 In van Helmont’s peculiar formulation, he instructed physicians to hang up the toad near a chimney to ensure it dried quickly, adding that the toad must be hung over a waxen dish while still alive, in a place where humans were regularly in its line of sight. Eventually the toad would vomit forth detritus and flies into the dish and then die. Once dried, the entire toad and the matter it vomited were to be pulverized and then mixed with the wax into a mass (or trochischus) that would serve as the core of the amulet, which was worn around the neck.

Fear was an important feature of this recipe and likewise a central feature in Tonge’s report to Oldenburg, but he strongly opposed van Helmont’s claims regarding the operation of the amulet. In his letter, Tonge confirms that fear was the basis of the duels between spiders and toads: the spiders were always the victorious aggressors, and the toads always their fearful victims. This also suggested to Tonge that the toad itself was a potential remedy against spider bites, which he cites among many other medicinal applications of the toad, including of course van Helmont’s zenexton. Though he disdained van Helmont’s zenexton in strong terms, Tonge did not deny that toads could be used in remedies for the plague. He simply questioned that toads were effective for the reasons that van Helmont supposed. Tonge doubted the necessity of powdering the toad with the detritus the dying animal vomited, suggesting instead that the efficacy of the amulet was derived from a quality of the toad that was likewise expressed in other toad-based remedies. None of these other remedies called for the peculiar steps taken by van Helmont, including his crucial instruction that the toad die in a state of terror with humans in view. Tonge understood the nature

62 Israel Tonge, “Correspondence to Henry Oldenburg,” 6 June 1670, MS EL/T/35, The Royal Society of London. 63 Van Helmont’s discussion of zenexton appears in “Tumulus Pestis,” Opuscula medica inaudita, pp. 70-80 (and esp. pp. 76-77).

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of the toad’s fear differently, and he dismissed its role in the Helmontian explanation for the efficacy of zenexton.

In Thomson’s day, challenges to the legitimacy of zenexton, such as Tonge’s, were directed to van Helmont’s explanations, even when the efficacy of the amulet was accepted. Thomson’s endorsement of zenexton is revealingly inverse: he upheld van Helmont’s explanations, even when the operation of the amulet did not appear to follow van Helmont’s descriptions. The zenexton given to Thomson by Starkey had been made into a trochischus that, per van Helmont’s instructions, was intended to be worn around the neck or in proximity to the part of the body where the disease manifested, such as buboes in the case of the bubonic plague. But Thomson’s anxiety motivated him to utilize his own less expertly prepared toads as well, in the process of which he expresses more confusion than clarity about the operation of zenexton and thereby reveals a great deal about his reliance on van Helmont’s textual authority.64

Thomson wore the toad he had prepared in proximity to his stomach, where he understood the disease to be primarily seated. He reports that after some hours the toad swelled significantly, which in pre-existing interpretations of zenexton was taken to indicate its curative powers.65 But this was in conflict with what van Helmont reports about his own preparations of dried toads, implying that Thomson had failed to properly follow van Helmont’s instructions. As Thomson relates, van Helmont denied Paracelsus’ claim that dried toads would tumefy when worn against buboes, insisting that the toads would not swell again once dead and dried, when there was no longer an archeus within the toad to produce inflammation.66 Whether or not Thomson had failed to properly prepare the dried toad, he nevertheless attests to its efficacy and defers to van

64 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 86: “I likewise hung about my neck a large Toad dried, prepared not long before in as exquisite a manner as possibly I could, with my own fingers” 65 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 86. 66 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 86-91; van Helmont’s critique of Paracelsus regarding zenexton appears in “Tumulus Pestis,” Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 76: “Promittit tandem bufonem sic siccatum (de ranis autem, nil prosecutus) buboni appositum, ita inse, totum virus Pestis tracturum, ut successive in quartum quintumve bufonem usque, omnes mirabiliter intumescant. … Imprimis fateor, me bufones applicuisse bubonibus, et escharis, tamin pectore, capite, mammillis, quam alibi tam in viris, quam mulieribus: ac ubique, non sine promto juvamine, et doloris mitigatione. At imprimis nunquam vidi, applicatum bufonem intumuisse tantillum. Quod et idcirco, ridiculum deinceps dixi.” His directions for the preparation of the toads appear on the same page: “Iusserat enim bufonem magnum, mense Junio post meridiem captum, tibiis suspenderem prope focum, illique subtenderem patina e cera flava. … Dein Julio mense, descrescente Luna, veteres Bufones cepi, quorum oculi scatebant albia vermibus: nigrisque capitibus prominentes, adeo ut uterque oculus totus in vermes transformatus esset, fortassis 50. numero, in singulo oculorum foramine vermes erant dense compacti, quorum capita foris eminebant […] Vermes autem in patinam ceream deciduos, simulque cum eo quod per vomitum rejecit, in trochiscos parvulos redegi, addito cadavere bufonis, et cerea patina.”

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Helmont’s authority, finally concluding: “Well, be the Cause never so abstruse, I am sufficiently perswaded, That the adjunction of this Bufo nigh my Stomack, was of wonderful force to master and tame this Venom then domineering in me, and thereby subjugate it to the dictates of the vital Spirit.”67 His own level of expertise notwithstanding, Thomson’s recovery confirmed that the zenexton healed him as van Helmont insisted it would.

In his treatise on the plague, van Helmont instructed that the zenexton be made from the remains of toads that perished in the presence of humans, of which they possessed a mortal fear arising from a natural antipathy. The residual impression of the dead toad’s fear in the amulet would then embolden and thereby bolster the body’s archeus against the mortal threat of the plague. For van Helmont – as Thomson did not fail to notice – the toad’s fear was crucially oriented to human beings. The zenexton did not destroy the plague – it enabled the human archaeus to destroy the plague. It did not simply eradicate the superficial fear that could be allayed by confidence in medicine – it enabled the archaeus to reject the morbific image of fear imprinted into the imagination, which allowed the disease to usurp the body’s native regulatory faculties to bring about its destruction.

Thomson promoted the use of this zenexton as an effective remedy, because it played into the conflict between the invasive disease seed and the body’s native archeus, bolstering the archeus’ capacity to expel disease by presenting to it an enemy weaker than itself. Importantly for Thomson, this imagery of conflict supplied the terms with which he articulated the nature of disease. He includes reiterative descriptions of how the body’s regulatory functions are redirected to self-destruction through the deposition of the archeus, which “being full of Consternation and Terror, throws away the Reins of orderly Government, and yields it self up captive to the imperious Placits of a Truculent Tyrant.”68 In his second chapter in Loimotomia, on the efficient and formal causes of the plague, the archeus is thus identified with both of these causes, because it is the archeus that receives the conception of the disease seed from the imagination and thereby forms the disease proper out of itself.69 It is for this reason that Thomson calls humans “Self destroyers,” whose native faculties become a “domestick Enemy” under pathological conditions.70

67 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 91. 68 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 36. 69 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 35: “These poysonous Atoms that lurk in the pores of the Air, and are wasted up and down with every blast, slighly entering into our bodies unfelt, unseen, cannot of themselves make the Pest, unless our archeus become an efficient and formal cause of its Quiddity; so that it hath its immediate being from our vital Spirit” 70 Thomson, Loimotomia, p. 35.

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Nowhere does Thomson mention the demon, and yet, he clearly adopts the novel features of van Helmont’s ontology of disease, which follow from its demonological framing.

In taking up van Helmont’s theory of disease, Thomson places particular emphasis on the violence of the archeus’ subjugation to the foreign directives of an invasive disease seed. This conflict between the body and disease therefore becomes a distinctive mark of Helmontian medicine in Loimotomia – both in the nature and operation of the plague and in its specific remedies. Thomson emphasizes in particular that this disease is an invasive agent existing in its own right. He then uses this feature of van Helmont’s ontology of disease to characterize the boundary between health and illness as that existing between the natural and the unnatural. Thomson’s articulation of how this understanding of disease as unnatural differed from the Galenic interpretation is worth quoting in its entirety:

[Galenists insist that diseases] arise from a depravation and distortion of Nature … So that a disease with them, is only a privation or mutilation of our health, a defection from Sanity, proceeding from divers Accidents that daily affect us preternaturally. For they think they have spoken enough, in telling us, that some good is exclusively taken from us, but are silent concerning that positive, real evil that infests us, having an absolute Entity in it, consisting of a seminal power, a fermental transmutation, an operative Spirit, and a lively Idea. All which Endowments make a Disease to be Ens reale verum, something in Reality.71

The boundaries of nature referred to by Thomson here are the boundaries of what is natural to human beings – that is, the boundaries of the body and its normal operations. What makes disease unnatural in the theories Thomson attacks is the conception of disease as an abnormal condition negatively impacting bodily activity – a deviation of the bodily state from its natural course. He also employs the term ‘preternatural’ as a criticism, indicating that disease in the Galenic conception is improperly situated in the natural order. For Thomson, fashioning himself as a true Helmontian, the disease is fully realized as a distinct entity and thus performs an aggressive role in its own development. Disease in the Helmontian formulation is unnatural in a distinct manner, possessing its own nature that is unnatural to the body that it invades.72 In this way, disease in the Helmontian sense does not merely infect the body but infests it, parasitizing the body’s native archeus. It was on these grounds that Thomson had already dismissed Galenic interest in

71 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 28-29. 72 See Chapter 3.

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“Anatomical Curiosities,” which appreciated neither the limitations of anatomical investigation nor the most useful way of conducting such investigations. “What is all this to the grand matter in hand,” he asks, referring to the primary mandate of the physician: “to be master of those Remedies which (proportionable to Diseases) are able to tame and subjugate them to the law of Nature.”73

The power struggle between the disease seed and the body’s native archeus is thus echoed on multiple registers in Loimotomia. In the medical practice of chymical physicians such as Thomson, curing disease was understood in terms of a conflict between the physician and the disease, following the Helmontian view in which the body’s regulatory faculties were described as besieged monarchs. In turn, the explanatory power of this disease theory was mobilized by Thomson in his struggle for legitimacy as a chymical physician practicing without licensure in the jurisdiction of the RCP, whose members did not hesitate to cast chymical physicians as enemies of the crown. The polemical language in which their conflict was expressed thus drew on the recent power shifts in England that inevitably shaped the character of this power struggle in professional medicine. Likewise, it becomes the role of the physician to reinstate order in the face of a governmental upheaval within the body that in turn mirrors the social disorder framing the medical debates of which this treatise was a part. The plague itself had long been associated with the chaos of social disorder that accompanied outbreaks, and here the debate allows Thomson’s professed mandate as a physician to dovetail with his bid for professional legitimacy.

A New Anatomy

The polemical exchange between Thomson and Johnson and the unfortunate dissection carried out by Thomson afterwards may seem like an unremarkable conflict playing out on the fringes of English medical practice at the time. If Thomson was merely an empiric - and even a bitter one, having failed to pass the RCP’s examination - Johnson was also merely an employee of the RCP, which sometimes begrudgingly granted him resources for preparing chymical medicaments. Neither were licensed physicians. But Thomson’s investment in distinguishing his Helmontian medicine was philosophical as well as professional. Thomson’s disdain for anatomy – and the character of his anatomical investigation – reveals fundamental points of tension between humoral and chymical medical theory. The role of terror in the Helmontian theory of the plague by necessity changed the epistemic role of anatomical investigation for chymical physicians. For Helmontians, the knowledge and cure of disease was the physician’s primary

73 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, pp. 25-27.

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mandate rather than the traditional emphasis on the dietetics and prophylactics that aimed at maintaining health through regulation of the humors. This shift in focus to the cure of disease entailed a shift in focus to the diseased body. Thomson’s critique of anatomy emphasizes distinctly Helmontian epistemological priorities, and indeed, when Thomson attacked traditional anatomy, he was aiming at a crucial part of the RCP’s institutional identity.

If van Helmont’s disease theory provided Thomson with a distinct basis for his claim to medical authority, his focus on therapeutics allowed him to forward an even stronger challenge to his academic adversaries and their inordinate emphasis on anatomical investigation. Thomson found a prominent target for this challenge in the RCP’s central figure, William Harvey. Harvey was the English physician who penned De motu cordis or On the Motion of the Heart (1628), which contains his famous description of blood circulation - an insight predicated on an untold number of dissections and vivisections. For thirty years, Harvey delivered the RCP’s annual anatomy lecture, and by 1652 – five years before his death – the RCP was already mobilizing plans to establish a library and a museum in his memory.74 A challenge to the value of Harvey’s work was therefore a challenge to the figure that the RCP placed at the center of its institutional identity and by extension a challenge to the legitimacy of the RCP and its authoritative claim to medical knowledge.

In 1665, Thomson already had some history with the late Harvey, who near the end of his life had evidently expressed interest in a dog that survived a splenectomy performed by Thomson.75 Most of the work Thomson published on this splenectomy was serviced to a priority dispute with the Royal Society of London after the publication of Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society in 1667, when Sprat listed a canine splenectomy among the accomplishments of the RSL’s fellows.76 Two years prior, however, Thomson was content to mention this splenectomy only in passing and indeed as part of his attack on anatomical investigation in Galeno-Pale: “we [Helmontians] were the first that in these parts of Europe have made the Experiment effectually

74 Annals Vol. IV, MS4145, Royal College of Physicians of London, fol. 44-45. The Harveian Museum was opened on 2 Feb 1653/4, with plans discussed in the Annals as early as December 1652. 75 Charles Webster, “The Helmontian George Thomson and William Harvey: The Revival and Application of Splenectomy to Physiological Research,” Medical History 15, no. 2 (1971): 154–167. Webster dates their meeting between 1655 and 1657. 76 Webster, “The Helmontian George Thomson and William Harvey,” pp. 157-58. Sprat’s brief comment appears in an expansive list following his professed intention “to lay down in short compass those parts of the visible World, about which they [the RSL fellows] have chiefly bestow'd their pains.” The sixth of these includes “Experiments Medicinal, and Anatomical; as of cutting out the Spleen of a Dog.” See: Thomas Sprat, The history of the Royal-Society of London for the improving of natural knowledge (London, 1667), pp. 215 and 223.

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of taking out the Spleen of a Dog, without which he lived perfectly well two years and a quarter; the same being often repeated by others who stiffly opposed it at first.”77 In many ways his interest in anatomy is clear, and indeed Thomson also purchased his doctoral degree from Leiden, the university where Franciscus Sylvius had famously demonstrated the Harveian circulation of blood while simultaneously promoting van Helmont’s chymical interpretation of bodily processes, particularly digestion.78 Thomson did not see the work of Harvey as incompatible with his work as a Helmontian. Nevertheless, the value of anatomy had its limits – after all,

What would it profit to tell our Patients that we had taken the Spleen out of a Dog, if they (afflicted in that part) could receive no benefit from us? what pittiful comforters should we be in such a case?79

Thomson’s understanding of how anatomical knowledge was to be of service to medicine led him to diverge greatly from Harvey’s focus on anatomy.

It was on the basis of therapeutics that Thomson launched his attack on Harvey in Galeno- Pale, when De motu cordis was almost forty years in circulation:

'Tis true, the Invention of the Circulation of the Blood by industrious Doctor Harvey, is highly to be commended, and gives some satisfaction in the solving certain Phaenomena in Physiologie and Aitiologie; yet we can see the Therapeutick part little advanced thereby, so that many stubborn Diseases are equally as hard to conquer (caeteris paribus) as they were before its discovery.80

Thomson contrasts the disciplinary aims of physiology and even etiology with that of therapeutic medicine. He insists that Harvey’s work, for all its worth, simply missed the point; if his advances were not a boon to therapeutics, then they were not in the strict sense a boon to medicine, which must take as its guiding aim the cure of disease. In doing so, Thomson not only adopts van Helmont’s theory of disease, he also places it at the foundation of medicine.

In Agyrto-Mastix, Johnson responded strongly to Thomson’s critique, but his defense of Harvey’s work indeed falters on the ground of therapeutics:

77 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 26. 78 See: Evan R. Ragland, “Mechanism, the Senses, and Reason: Franciscus Sylvius and Leiden Debates Over Anatomical Knowledge After Harvey and Descartes,” in Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy, eds. P Distelzweig et al. (Springer: 2016), pp. 173-205. 79 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 27. 80 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 27.

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… though I confess with our Authour [Thomson], that our Officinall Medicines, in his own sense, are not more sufficient and powerfull now, then they were before the improvement of Anatomy; yet, the judgement of the Physitians in the use and more proper application of them being advanc't, the benefit which the Patient receives, must needs be the greater.81

Johnson could only insist that Harvey’s insights were invaluable for improving the proper administration of medicaments, even if the official pharmacopoeia had not directly benefitted. He went on to claim, perhaps surprisingly to the modern reader, that Harvey’s work was of greatest value for improving techniques for therapeutic blood-letting, which chymical physicians strongly opposed as harmful to the vital spirits.82 But Johnson nevertheless concedes the point to Thomson: if physicians primarily value the improvement of medicinal remedies for the cure of disease, then the value of Harvey’s anatomical work is considerably diminished. The theory of disease that Thomson adopted from van Helmont did not simply lead him to value different epistemic practices; in opposition to Johnson’s syncretic approach, the Helmontian perspective led him to an understanding of medicine and its aims and practices that was fundamentally incompatible with that of the RCP.

Today, Harvey continues to enjoy a central position for the RCP. A Harveian Oration is still delivered there annually as it has been since 1656, and in fact in 2018, the RCP celebrated their 500th anniversary by designing an exhibition around Harvey’s life and works. On the website for this exhibition, the significance of Harvey’s anatomical work was described as follows:

Harvey encouraged his fellow physicians ‘to search and study out the secrets of nature by way of experiment’. His legacy of curiosity, research and discovery has had a lasting impact on the practice and science of medicine. This exhibition places William Harvey at the heart of the RCP as it celebrates its 500th anniversary.83

The epistemic power of anatomical investigation is no longer in doubt. The RCP’s emphasis on Harvey’s search into the secrets of nature, the repeated invocation of his discovery and its impact, and more broadly speaking the decision to make Harvey representative of the RCP and its history reveals a great deal about what kind of medical epistemology the organization promotes as the

81 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 29. 82 See: Peter H. Niebyl, “Galen, Van Helmont, and Blood Letting,” in Science, Medicine, and Society in the Renaissance: Essays to Walter Pagel, ed. Allen G. Debus. Vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 13-23. 83 Royal College of Physicians, “Ceaseless Motion: William Harvey’s experiments in circulation.” 2017.

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most characteristic of its historical development and the most impactful for the history of medicine in general.

In light of the medical polemics discussed here, however, it is clear that in 1665 the value of anatomical investigation could not be taken for granted. For Helmontian chymical physicians, diseases were understood to arise from seminal ideas inaccessible to the senses and thus could not be known essentially through mere anatomical dissection. There were, however, alternatives. In his chapter-by-chapter critique of Thomson’s Galeno-Pale, Johnson reports with some disbelief that Thomson decries anatomical investigation only to speak “wildly of a Pyrotechnicall Anatomy,” following with standard accusations that such chymists do more harm than good to their patients.84 But in the passage that Johnson only partially quotes, Thomson goes on to claim that this “Pyrotechincall Anatomy” is capable of revealing what anatomical dissection could not. This chymical investigation, he says, “alone can reclude the Secrets of Nature, and shew us where every Disease is seated, and by what effectual wayes it may be disturbed, and thrown out of that Vital Light in which it lives and dyes.”85 In the view of the Helmontian, the body opened by dissection was not truly opened in any sense meaningful to medical epistemology. The interior signs of the plague that Thomson uncovered were equivalent to the symptoms that manifested externally, all of which were secondary to the essence of the disease. Chymical physicians instead accessed the interior of the body without necessarily dissecting the body at all. This pyrotechnical anatomy – consciously presented as superior to anatomical dissection – revealed the hidden interiors of nature through chymical analysis.

In the semiotics of chymical medicine, the signs leading to knowledge of diseases and their cures were often subtler than the physical signs sought under the anatomist’s knife. As Thomson contends, the quiddity of disease could not be conflated with its effects; its essence – the idea that frames the disease in the body – remained inaccessible to the senses. Thomson claims that it is not the anatomist’s knife but the alchemist’s fire that reveals the inner workings of the body. Pyrotechnical anatomy – the chymical analysis of material substances – was alone capable of explicating the chymical processes that either sustained or destroyed the body under normal or pathological conditions and thereby revealed the unseen interactions behind these manifest transformations.

84 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 30. 85 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 29.

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Pyrotechny Asserted

Thomson called himself a “true disciple of Helmont,” so it comes as no surprise that he would turn to van Helmont to tell him what he should find during his Loimotomia dissection or that he would defer to van Helmont’s textual authority when contradictions arose between the Ortus and his trials with toads. In responding to Thomson’s Galeno-Pale, Johnson latched onto Thomson’s self-fashioning as a Helmontian when he accused him of “[holding] forth the Doctrine of Vanhelmont, as down right Gospel.”86 He insinuated that Thomson’s confusion revealed van Helmont’s followers to be less capable than van Helmont himself.87 Thomson’s limitations sometimes do suggest a Helmontian readership that was ill-equipped to build on van Helmont’s works, but this assumption dismisses the active engagement of that readership – one that, in Thomson’s case, led to a restructuring of van Helmont’s duumvirate after successful trials with splenectomy. Taking Helmontians as reasonably competent readers of van Helmont, we must note the drive to build on his works (urged by van Helmont himself) that was exercised alongside a deference for van Helmont’s textual authority. When Helmontians focus on explicating van Helmont’s ideas within the philosophical system he built, their works reveal what emerged from his enormous and often cumbersome corpus as the most innovative, authoritative, and cogent of his ideas.

What would become characteristically Helmontian features of the chymical philosophy of disease enabled Helmontian physicians to carefully promote an ambitious therapeutic program that drew upon the same explanatory framework. These efforts were built upon van Helmont’s name and in particular his concept of disease, and for van Helmont, the imagination plays multiple roles in this conceptualization. The manner in which imagination produces disease makes disease dependent upon the body. Outside of the body, disease exists only in potential, but this view nonetheless allows disease to be considered ontologically distinct from the diseased. This imagining of disease also had epistemological implications that play out in the works of later Helmontians. This included Thomson’s promotion of pyrotechnical anatomy, a phrase used by Starkey in 1658 with the publication of his polemical text Pyrotechny Asserted.

Starkey’s works demonstrate a more sophisticated engagement with chymical practice, including a surviving collection of laboratory notes and printed texts that engage closely with the details of laboratory work, on which points Thomson is consistently vague. In contrast with

86 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 41. 87 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 43.

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Thomson’s self-appointment as a disciple of van Helmont, Starkey claims that “[Helmont] I formerly made My Chimical Evangelist, but do now believe, not convinced by his Arguments and Reasons, but by experimental Confirmation, and practical ocular demonstration.”88 Opposing arguments and reasons with chymical experiment and practical (not discursive) demonstration had a tropic status by the mid-sixteenth century; Starkey’s confirmations and demonstrations of van Helmont’s texts were ultimately guided by them. Starkey is also sensitive to the irony in writing a book that encourages readers not to rely on texts; in step with van Helmont, Starkey drew from a long-standing chymical tradition of what has been termed in modern scholarship “practical exegesis,” the engagement with textual exegesis that took place in the laboratory.89 In turn, Starkey calls his books “Sea-marks,” going on to write that his readers “may by pondering our Words, know if his operations be true or no; and if not, where his errour is, and how to amend it.”90 Texts on chymical medicine were not presented merely as textual authority; as van Helmont, writes, “our writings are among the ranks of exhortations, in order that each may profit according to his own labors, so much as shall be granted to him from above.”91 For both Thomson and Starkey, vesting authority in van Helmont’s theory of disease would prove to be formative for their laboratory and clinical practices.

Starkey’s defense of pyrotechny is a defense of chymistry in general, bearing many of the marks of a chymical treatise and the epistemological conceits associated with them. But it also presents pyrotechny as pyrotechnical anatomy, much like Thomson opposing it to anatomical investigation in order to promote chymical epistemology. When Johnson inveighed against Thomson’s use of the phrase “pyrotechnical anatomy,” his frustration rings clear; it isn’t at all discernible from Galeno-Pale precisely what Thomson meant. Johnson’s suggestion that Thomson referred to the calcination of bodies is a fair guess. This line between the refined separation of

88 George Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted and illustrated to be the surest and safest means for arts triumph over natures infirmities being a full and free discovery of the medicinal mysteries studiously concealed by all artists, and onely discoverable by fire … (London: Printed by R. Daniel, for Samuel Thomson, 1658), sig. B1r. 89 Jennifer Rampling, “Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as ‘Practical Exegesis’ in Early Modern England,” Osiris 29, no. 1 (2014): 19-34. 90 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, pp. 3-4. 91 In this excerpt, van Helmont was responding to letters in which his readers asked him to write less abstrusely: “Peurilis humoristarum vindicta,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 523: “Ignoscant ergo mihi, quotquot ad me scribunt haec verba: Sodes explica te, loquere apertius, de Arcanorum praeparatione. Quia ista est nova addiscendae Philosophiae methodus, quam addiscere oportet, modo quo eam didici. Vendit enim Deus sudoribus artes. Etenim nil in Spagyricis scriptum ea intentione, ut intelligantur promiscue ab omnibus, sed dumtaxat ne intelligantur. Idque Chymia prae caeteris disciplinis semper servavit singulare, e mandato Domini: ne rosae ante homines et porcos spargantur. Scripta namque nostra sunt exhortationum loco, ut quisque propriis proficiat laboribus, quantum superne sibi indultum fuerit.”

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chymical distillation and the destructive action of naked flame is a distinction of expertise that Starkey likens to the difference between the anatomist and the butcher:

But because the fire alone is but the Destroyer of seminal virtue, and whatever it masters, it doth not only extinguish the same, but it doth alter it notably into strange Heterogeneities, in which that eminent Crasis (of which we boast) is not to be seen, therefore have the Sons of Art invented and prepared means for the praevious dissolution of compacted bodies, by which means the bodies being opened, the more noble parts may be severed from the ignoble and unactive, and by this their end is attained.92

Starkey writes about “opening bodies” in the chymical sense, with both metaphysical and physical implications. This involves the chymical prerogative to separate and purify, to identify and isolate the active essence of natural substances. What gave pyrotechny epistemological currency was what Starkey claimed to be the capacity to “unlock” the hidden interiors of natural bodies – that is, their essences:

The Art of Pyrotechny then (in brief,) is nothing else, then by the help of Vulcan to know how to unlock Natures secrets, which are shut up in concretes Vegetable, Animal, and Mineral; and to exalt them to the height of their perfection, and that by the means of hidden and secret Agents preparable in Nature, by the fires help, and the Artists craft.93

Thomson later mobilized a Helmontian understanding of disease in his argument that anatomical investigation was incapable of accessing the true interiors of the body. The pyrotechnical anatomy that he opposed to it drew upon the epistemological claims here articulated by Starkey in relation to chymical practice broadly considered. And in turn, Starkey’s work had its precedent in van Helmont, who writes: “The schools have admired the dissections of cadavers; they have not yet examined the anatomy of sweats through digestions, soot, elections, admixtures, resolutions, or expulsions,” invoking chymical processes that easily map onto the body in the chymical interpretation of physiology.94 Indeed, van Helmont elaborated on the epistemic power of chymistry in the terms that Starkey later borrowed, writing that chymistry is the means whereby

92 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, p. 16. 93 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, pp. 4-5. 94 van Helmont, “Latex humor neglectus,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 373: “Cadaverum dissectiones admirarae sunt Scholae: sunt sudoris anatomiam nondum per digestiones, fuligines, electiones, ad mistiones, resolutiones, aut expulsores, introspexerunt.”

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“bodies may be opened” – and indeed whereby “the occult may be made manifest.”95 Where gross anatomy failed to grant access to the essence of disease, pyrotechnical anatomy could succeed, because it was equipped to grant access to natural essences in general and, more specifically, to the chymical processes in the body through which disease manifested. In this way, pyrotechnical anatomy is not oriented specifically at the human body but at all natural bodies, placing Helmontian medical epistemology within a broader philosophical framework shaped by the prerogative of the chymical physician.

In Chapter 1, we saw that a physician named Nathaniel Hodges disparaged “empiricks” as potentially utilizing demonic power to effect cures for which they are incapable of providing rational, causal explanations.96 In fact Hodges was an RCP physician, and indeed this tract, Vindiciae Medicinae & Medicorum, formed another front on which Thomson traded blows with humoral physicians.97 Restoration England was a lively time and place for medical debate (and indeed medical practice); one physician returning to London after exile during the Interregnum, Tobias Whitaker, wrote in 1661 that there were “in no age so many separatists in Arts and Sciences, as in this present age; nor any Region so insane and ill-principled at present, as this Region of England hath lately been.”98 Van Helmont’s followers comprised a heterogenous group within this medical milieu, and indeed in the 1660s, the “restless spirit of that mad Vanhelmont” was clearly still inspiring humoral physicians to vent their spleens in feverish refutation of his “spawn,” the chymical physicians.99 Yet these Helmontians no longer adhered to the radical theory of magic around which van Helmont built his medical reform. By the time Thomson’s polemical exchanges saw print, physicians had established greater distance from the demonological debates of van Helmont’s day. But van Helmont’s theory of disease – and the ambitious epistemic and therapeutic

95 van Helmont, “Potestas medicaminum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 483: “Durissima namque, et compactissima, ita Chymia resolvit, ut nedum oblita prioris coaguli, et constantiae contra ignem, in succum domabilem retroeant, occultaque palam fiant: verum in super nobis evadant socialia. Imo nedum res ipsas sic praeparat; sed et media efficit, quibus corpora aperiantur.” 96 Nathaniel Hodges, Vindiciæ Medicinæ & Medicorum, pp. 9-10. 97 On Thomson’s dispute with Hodges, see: Kathleen Miller, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2016), Chapter 3. 98 Tobias Whitaker, An elenchus of opinions concerning the cure of the small pox together with problematicall questions concerning the cure of the French pest (London: Printed by J.G. for Nath. Brook, 1661), pp. 4-5. See also pp. 34- 35, wherein he identifies the rejection of blood-letting as a Helmontian position. 99 Whitaker, An elenchus of opinions, pp. 4-5. Whitaker throws barbs at van Helmont when turning to the subject of the preternatural, which he shortly dismissed on grounds that van Helmont would have shared: “The subject of this Discourse is now disputed, whether it be a Disease, or any disposition praeternatural? but I presume this is but a gymnastick exercise, argumentandi gratia, tossing each to other a few canting terms [...]”

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programs that it justified – continued to shape medical practices. Unseen therein, his demonological concept of the pathological lived on. In the final chapter, we will see how the height of the epistemic and therapeutic ambitions predicated on this concept of the pathological shaped medical practices, even when these lofty aims remained unreached.

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CHAPTER 5 | THE SPOOR OF DISEASE: UNIVERSAL MEDICINE AND VENATIC

EPISTEMOLOGY

Four years before he died of the plague in 1665, Starkey related that he had spent more than a decade of his professional life consumed with a project aimed at the synthesis of the liquor alkahest.1 The principle of this substance was relatively straight-forward: the alkahest was a universal solvent with the potential to serve as a universal medicine – that is, a medicine with the capacity to cure any disease. Starkey gleaned what he knew of the alkahest partly from Paracelsus, with whom the alkahest was thought to originate, but primarily from van Helmont, who offered most of its elaborations. 2 We have already seen how English Helmontians interpreted van Helmont’s medical philosophy within their own time, taking up lines of argument from his work that best supported their professional interests as physicians. Van Helmont’s theory of disease stands at the center of this philosophical and practical crossroads, because it provided the philosophical framework that both guided and justified Helmontian therapeutics. In practice, this distinguished the Helmontian physician’s understanding of the primary responsibility of the physician and the goal of medicine: to cure disease with powerful medicines. An important part of this ambition was the delineation of human efficacy in the natural world, which also supplied its limitations.

Thomson demonstrated this clearly when he referred to the “grand matter” of Helmontian medicine as the potential to become “master of those Remedies which (proportionable to Diseases) are able to tame and subjugate them to the law of Nature.”3 This subtle distinction between mastering nature and mastering remedies was an important part of expanding the

1 George Starkey, Via ad vitam, being a short and sure vvay to a long life, or, Helmont justified, and the excellency of chymicall medicaments vindicated (London, 1661), p. 295. For a detailed exposition of Starkey’s chemistry (as gleaned from his laboratory notebooks) in his quest for the alkahest, see Newman’s Gehennical Fire, which takes Starkey’s search for the alkahest as its primary subject. 2 Ladislao Reti describes a brief etymology of the term ‘alkahest’ as originating with Paracelsus; early modern writers generally attributed it to Paracelsus as well. However, Reti designates van Helmont as the writer who did most to establish the concept of the alkahest, including providing information with which a chymist might seek to replicate his work. See: Ladislao Reti, “Van Helmont, Boyle and the Alkahest,” in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Medicine and Science, by Ladislao Reti and William C. Gibson (University of California, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969). 3 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, pp. 26-27. Cf. p. 96, wherein he describes the Helmontian physician as administering “those friendly Medicines, which may assist Nature immediately to conquer its grand enemy the Disease, that at length there may be a happy conclusion to Health.”

122 purview of chymical medicine without overstepping the boundaries of nature. Thomson did not fail to notice that van Helmont had described medicine as a process of learning how to enable nature to heal the body, rather than one in which the physician intervened directly. More specifically, van Helmont cast the physician as the keeper of the archeus; just as disease subverted the archeus, the physician’s responsibility was to restore it. The physician cures by creating the circumstances under which the natural governor of the body can reassert itself over disease and expel it from the body.

Van Helmont’s ontology of disease brings to light the relation between chymical transformation in general and chymical therapeutics in particular through their shared claims to universal efficacy. Assigning disease an essence fundamental to its influence over the body and the physician’s ability to expel it requires that essential knowledge of diseases be possible to access. Starkey’s search for the alkahest was only one manifestation of how Helmontian medicine encouraged programmatic change; this new medicine entailed new ways of knowing the body in disease and illness, and new ways of acting on this knowledge. Whether or not the alkahest was obtainable, the belief that it was possible to obtain shaped medical practices regardless. For this reason, I will use this final chapter to introduce both universal remedies and the physician’s way of knowing, which was shared by (and conceptualized after) the hunter. In a treatise entitled Venatio scientiarum (The Hunting of Sciences), van Helmont placed the epistemic ambitions of his medical philosophy beyond the limitations of reason to obtain perfected knowledge of the natural world.4 Invoking the tacit knowledge of the hunter, which was gleaned through long experience, van Helmont indicated a path reaching to knowledge of the unfamiliar through the familiar – the “venetic” epistemology of his chymical medicine.5 The theory that promised this knowledge changed the terms of the hunt for Helmontians, even if its promises were never quite attainable.

The Liquor Alkahest

Starkey first arrived in England on a ship from America, where his work on the alkahest began as early as 1647, while he was still studying medicine at Harvard.6 It was 1650 when he first

4 van Helmont, “Venatio scientiarum,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 19-32. 5 See also: Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues – Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989 [1986]). Cf. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, pp. 269-300, which draws on Ginzburg’s work. 6 Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 181-82. Newman marks the year 1647 as the beginning of Starkey’s search for the alkahest on the basis of an autobiographical note written into a copy of Starkey’s A Brief Examination and Censure of Several Medicines (London, 1664), a text in which Starkey attacked charlatan physicians for

123 set foot in London in search of better chymical apparatus, and in less than two years he had become a close associate of Robert Boyle and the intellectual circle of Samuel Hartlib. 7 Maintaining a claim to the alkahest played an important role in cementing his good reputation in England and maintaining his association with Boyle and the Hartlib circle – indeed, it was Boyle whom Starkey wrote to in January 1651/2 when he had his first major breakthrough in his search for the alkahest.

Starkey’s interest in the alkahest was not limited to medicine nor even primarily about medicine; the alkahest had the capacity to catalyze material transmutation of any variety and thus had considerably diverse potential in chymistry. Starkey, in fact, expressed his desire to leave the medical profession in favor of chymical research, but his long-term investment in such research led him to debtor’s prison by the end of the 1650s, at which point he found himself competing in the same medical market as other chymical physicians such as George Thomson.8 Because he was then reliant upon his income as a physician, Starkey was challenged to elevate his professional reputation at the same time that he was pressed to produce results in clinical practice. The alkahest informed his answers to both of these challenges. Competing in a medical market filled with entrepreneurial chymists, Starkey was able to flaunt his acquaintance with chymical arcana such as the alkahest as markers of a true chymical adept, which he intended to set him apart from the quacks, empirics, and charlatans with which chymists were so often associated.9 The alkahest was

selling fraudulent panaceae. Newman provides a transcription of the note with translation in Appendix II of Gehennical Fire, pp. 248-251: “Postquam ab anno 1647 ad hunc usque annum, & diem, investigationi liquoris Alchahest, multis studiis, vigiliis, laboribus ac impensis insudassem, hoc die (primo) ejus integram notitiam assequi, & perfectum complementum videri datum est, & indigno mihi concessum, a summo luminum Patre, Deo optime maximo, cui aeterne laudes, & nunc et in saecula”. The note is dated 20 September 1658. Part of an additional note from the same text reads (with Newman’s editorial brackets): “Circa finem puta anni 1654 totum mihi secretum per gratiam divinam innotuit a quo tempore ob varias causas impeditus fui ne ad completam perfectionem opus perducerem, ad hunc usque annum 1660. qui annus est mihi decimus sextus a studii hujus prima salutatione, ab incoetis[?] vero laboribus decimus quintus.” This note reports that Starkey had his breakthrough in 1654 and had successfully synthesized the alkahest by 1654. However, he addressed a letter to Robert Boyle on 26 January 1651/2 in which he claimed that the secret of the alkahest had been revealed to him in a divine dream (discussed below); see: George Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, ed. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 66-75. 7 Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 52-53. 8 Newman quotes a surviving fragment of a letter that Starkey wrote to Boyle: “I have freed myself once and for all from Praxis, because I find that in my searching after secrets, for which I greatly long, I am detained and dissipated,” Gehennical Fire, p. 58. Translated by Newman from the German, which he provides as follows: “ich habe mich aber ein vor alle mal von der Praxi lossgemacht weil ich befinde dass ich in meiner Erforschung der Arcanorum, wornach mich sehr verlanget aufgehalten und zerstreuet werde,” Dr. Georg Starkeys Chymie (Nuremberg: Johann Friedrich Ruediger, 1722), pp. 455-456. Newman notes that this letter was written within six months of Starkey’s arrival in England. 9 See: Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 62-78.

124 therefore not simply a theoretical pinnacle of chymical medicine; it marked the distinction between craft knowledge and philosophical knowledge in a field that, for its learned practitioners, enjoined its praise of laboratory work with the promise of philosophical knowledge. Simultaneously, Starkey emphasized the considerable difficulty involved in actually synthesizing the alkahest, tempering the ambition of chymical medicine with the more modest promises it could bring to bear in the present.

The universal cure changed the way that Helmontians practiced medicine – but it did so without ever conclusively entering medical practice. This is not to say that Helmontians touted universal medicines that modern sensibilities suggest were frauds, but rather that Helmontians themselves recognized the obstacles to obtaining such a medicine and, in turn, its incredible impracticality for medical practice. Whether or not Starkey managed to create the alkahest, it was not a tool to be widely distributed, nor was it a particularly practical addition to the chymical pharmacopoeia. Its significance for medicine was therefore only partly practical and highly philosophical: the alkahest represented the promises made by chymical medicine about what was possible to do in nature and about what was possible to know about nature. While Starkey may not have admitted even to himself that the alkahest was unobtainable, he still spent over a decade chasing this dream, in the process bringing his life to ruin. This financial ruin kept him in the medical marketplace where he continued to practice medicine, and there, having this Helmontian dream within his sights was enough to shape his medical practice in distinct ways.

William Johnson derided Thomson for treating van Helmont’s Ortus as gospel, and Thomson did call himself a disciple of van Helmont; Starkey, on the other hand, consciously denied any such uncritical discipleship, claiming that “[Helmont] I formerly made My Chimical Evangelist, but do now believe, not convinced by his Arguments and Reasons, but by experimental Confirmation, and practical ocular demonstration.”10 Starkey may have been more willing to challenge van Helmont than Thomson was, but both used van Helmont’s textual legacy as a starting point and general guiding framework in medicine. Starkey’s synthesis of the alkahest followed van Helmont’s theoretical framework just as closely as Thomson’s dissection of the pestilential body. Starkey relied on scant textual clues in van Helmont’s published treatises to tell him what he was looking for, and indeed to indicate potential candidates with which to begin his laboratory work. He was chasing a chymical for which van Helmont never provided a recipe, although the latter did relate some of the substantial promises of the alkahest, along with some properties according to which Starkey judged his work. The alkahest appears in a number of places

10 Starkey, Pyrotechny Asserted, sig. B1r.

125 in van Helmont’s work as a crowning jewel of his chymical pharmacopoeia, and van Helmont lists the alkahest among the arcana uncovered (if without perfect understanding) by Paracelsus. In his Opuscula, van Helmont describes this universal solvent as operating by increasing the subtlety of material bodies through the “separation of the luminous being from the concrete remains” – in other words, the alkahest is capable of perfected purification, allowing the distillation of powerful tinctures from gross matter and the transformation of material substance.11 As a chymical solvent that enabled perfected purification of material bodies, the alkahest was said to be incorruptible, diminishing neither in weight nor in purity through its action upon other bodies.12 This would mean that the alkahest acted without being acted upon in return, resolving any substance into essential components through an action upon that substance rather than through a reaction with it. As van Helmont stated elsewhere, “the liquor alkahest, being the same number, weight, and activity, prevails as much in the thousandth action, as in the first.”13 In theory, the alkahest, once properly refined, was incorruptible; it could be used an unlimited number of times, because it would not be consumed in acting upon another substance.

When Starkey discusses the relative merit of different chymical medicines, he ties this merit to the generality of their applicability. Medicines that could be prescribed in more diverse circumstances were more powerful. The most powerful – curing the most diseases and being the most difficult to obtain – were those capable of “insinuating themselves into and relieving the languishing fountain of life,” referring to the body’s vital spirits and ultimately the archeus.14 The medicinal applications of the alkahest were twofold. Tinctures prepared using the alkahest would be of the highest purity possible – an isolation of the essential, seminal properties that granted

11 van Helmont, “Formarum ortus,” in Ortus medicinae , p. 148: “Id quod Pyrotechnia declarat, seductione luminaris entis, a reliquo concreto.” He goes on to write of the alkahest in performing this: “Quippe per ignem Gehennae, qui est liquor Alkahest, Paracelsi, sciri potest, quantam alterutrius luminaris partem, vegetabile (etiam incognitum, contusum, ac situ obductum) possideat, non minus quam qua figura ornatum fuerit.” Cf. “Progymnasma meteori,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 68: “Et hactenus Alcahest Paracelsi, cuncta naturae corpora penetrando, subtiliando transmutat.” 12 See: van Helmont, “Ignota actio regiminis,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 334: “Quibus scilicet unicus et idem liquor, Alkahest, omnia totius universi corpora tangibilia perfecte reducit in vitam corundem primam, absque ulla sui mutatione, viriumque diminutione.”; “Arcana Paracelsi,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 790: “Eminentior est eius liquor Alkahest immutabilis aqua solvens, et sal circulatus eius, qui reducit omne corpus tangibile, in liquorem sui concreti.” 13 van Helmont, “De febribus,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 52: “Quod liquor Alkahest, idem in numero, pondere et activitate tantum valet millesima actione, quantum prima.” Van Helmont also mentions here that the alkahest can be made from common mercury. 14 George Starkey, A brief examination and censure of several medicines of late years extol'd for universal remedies, and arcana's of the highest preparation ... by which the art of pyrotechny is in danger of being brought into reproach and contempt ... (London: Printed for the author, 1664), pp. 2-3.

126 natural substances medicinal power. Successfully refining the alkahest for administration as a medicine of its own, on the other hand, would make it capable of administering its purifying powers within the archeus itself. In theory, then, the alkahest would be effective in synthesizing medicines for specific diseases in addition to being effective against difficult diseases that exercised a more powerful hold over the archeus by purifying the archeus directly. In the latter case, the medicinal power of the alkahest to cure disease would be undifferentiated in its application and universally effective.

This claim to the possibility of a universal cure – of the conviction that there are no incurable diseases – was made possible at least in part by the manner in which van Helmont defined disease. No one would deny that disease manifests in highly diverse ways, but the suggestion that all divisions of disease could be submitted to the same medicine had to be supported by the assumption that all specific diseases participate in the same essence qua disease. We have already seen van Helmont describe this essence of disease very clearly: all diseases have a nature both dependent upon and unnatural to human life. In his taxonomy of disease, van Helmont described the shared primary cause of diseases as the movement from non-being to being through the seminal generation empowered by the archeus. Starkey prided himself on building upon van Helmont’s works rather than simply adopting his ideas, but he retains this aspect of van Helmont’s disease theory in its entirety, with an important emphasis on what his theory means for the classification of disease:

And indeed what are all diseases, but so many and distinct furies of one and the same Archeus, which is variously provoked, according to the varieties of the occasionate peccant matter, or impressed Ideall character, on any of the viscera, from whence by irradiation of the anger of the Archeus, various parts are variously tormented, as the accidentall occasionate matter shall give distinction.15

Starkey recognized the signs of individual diseases as secondary to the essence of disease; ultimately diseases relied upon the power of the archeus, which the disease’s seminal directive turned to its purposes.

Starkey’s understanding of the chymical operations made possible by the alkahest was based on van Helmont’s elaborations, and these drew heavily from his understanding of seminal generation. In a glossary appended to his Opuscula, van Helmont describes the alkahest as a liquor

15 Starkey, Via ad vitam, p. 291

127 that “resolves every visible body into its primary matter, the power of the seeds being preserved.”16 In van Helmont’s metaphysics, this meant opening bodies to their seminal beginnings, that is, to the most subtle part of that body that was allied to its seminal idea. In describing pyrotechnical anatomy, Starkey contrasted the refined work of chymical analysis with the destructive purifying action of naked flame: “fire alone is but the Destroyer of seminal virtue.”17 Starkey goes on to remark on the highly caustic and purifying power of this chymical solvent, quoting an adage from van Helmont: “Vulgus igne cremat, nos aquâ” – that is, “the vulgar burn by fire, we by water.”18 Claiming that the alkahest could resolve material bodies into their first matter without destroying their seminal principle, as fire would, meant that the alkahest could be used to isolate the most subtle material essence of a material body – that essence being the seminal character that first directed its generation. This line between destruction and purification could be a perilous one, especially with a highly caustic chymical solvent. Like Thomson, Starkey’s faith in his own work is clear in his willingness to test them on his own body; he remarks that in its in raw form, the solvent drew blood when he tasted it.19 It was only through subsequent processing that the chymical could be made useful.

In his Ortus, van Helmont claims that the alkahest provides a universal cure by casting it as a universal purifier. He clarifies by returning to his argument against healing by contraries, in which a physician would correct a humoral imbalance by counteracting with contrary elementary qualities.20 Van Helmont does not engage the invasive disease seed with contraries to its nature,

16 van Helmont, “De Lithiasi,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, sig. A4v: “Liquor Altahest [sic] Paracelsi, omne corpus visibile, resolvit in primam sui materiam, servata seminum potestate. De hoc ajunt Chymici: Vulgus cremat per ignem, nos per aquam.” 17 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, p. 16. 18 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, p. 18; Cf. Note 14 above. This distinction in different levels of refinement in the analysis by fire was a pre-existing feature of matter theory in chymical philosophy; see: Allen G. Debus, “Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Chemistry, Alchemy, and the New Philosophy, 1550-1700: Studies in the History of Science and Medicine (London: Variorum Reprints, 1987), Section VII. Van Helmont’s version incorporates semina; see, e.g., “Arbor vitae,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 798: “Ratum ergo, quod quamvis multa distillando fiant acutiora, adeoque magis activa: tamen eo ipso recedant et alienentur a genuina seminum proprietate. Quia Ignis est mors artificialis, quae si aperta flamma fiat, contingit per seminum et Archei extinctionem. Mors autem naturalis rerum praesupponit lassationem seminum. Mors autem artificialis, quae non sit per flammae consumtionem: separat quidem volatilia a fixis, cum dissolutione et morte vitae ultimae concreti. Sed et ideo alterantur et alienantur per ignem vires pristinae, et nova creatura resurgit ex igne, ex materiali dispositione, pristinis entis proprietatibus, per inversionem in morte artificiali obviam.” On the matter theory behind the inversion that van Helmont mentions here, see Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 112-14. See also the discussion of ferment in Chapter 3. 19 Starkey, Liquor Alkahest, p. 26. Cf. Starkey, “Starkey to Boyle, 26 January 1651/2,” Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, p. 71: “Dicam jam stoliditates aliquot in hoc liquore commissas, Dum distillarem, guttam ut gustarem accepi, statimque linguam ictu oculi penetravit cruentamque fecit…” 20 See: van Helmont, “Natura contrariorum nescia,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 164-178.

128 nor does his chymical medicine – for all its ambition – seek to claim more power than what is possible in nature. Rather than combatting the disease directly, the chymical physican allies himself to the body’s governing faculties and enables them to combat and expel the disease instead. In this way, a chymical physician conquers nature by exercising power over the processes that only nature itself can directly regulate, by knowing how to enable these processes to take place through artifice. In this sense, all remedies in the Helmontian framework that seek to expel disease through the reinvigoration of the archeus effect their cure by enabling the body to remove disease itself – just as the body inflicts disease upon itself.

As we have seen, all of the divisions of diseases that van Helmont described were considered to be inflections of a shared affliction of the archeus. But van Helmont’s classification of disease did not assume that disease was undifferentiated in the humoral sense, according to which disease was a state rather than a being in its own right. Diseases might take root in the imagination in various ways and under varying conditions, which comprise the secondary, occasional causes of disease delineated in van Helmont’s classification of diseases. These secondary causes could be removed to alleviate symptoms, and doing so might allow the archeus to free itself of the morbific influence, meaning that remedies aimed at removing conditions of disease could be effective in curing disease. But recognizing occasional causes as such changed the medical program, in which medicines that were not capable of freeing the archeus became mere palliatives instead of cures. Furthermore, claiming that all diseases shared a root in the archeus that could be targeted irrespective of any secondary cause would make classifications of incurable diseases obsolete. The need to abstract from secondary causes in order to arrive at essential knowledge of disease would then become unnecessary, in theory allowing van Helmont to retain an essentialist medical philosophy without sacrificing his subscription to the reality of occult causation. Identifying a common cause of disease made the occult operation of individual diseases irrelevant to medicine at its highest potential. This potential, however, was hardly a reality in day-to-day medical practice.

On Dropsy: Thomas Sydenham

English Helmontians like Starkey and Thomson, following van Helmont’s lead, were familiar with the idiosyncrasies of illness yet fixated upon the ambitions of Helmontian medicine, which relied upon the accessibility of essential knowledge of the natural world. This was partly how they justified rejecting incurable diseases – by claiming that essential knowledge of disease was attainable and that perfectly effective medicines could be made as a result. As we have seen, their confidence rested partly on the uncompromising epistemology of van Helmont’s chymical

129 philosophy, in which the limitations of gross anatomy could be circumvented in the laboratory. This was another reason why the harmonization of van Helmont and Galen, which Johnson suggested, was not possible according to Helmontian physicians like Thomson. There was thus a reason why chymical medicine was often accused of being dangerous; its philosophical framing promoted aggressive therapeutic practices. Such dangers are often demonstrable in chymical recipes, but their ambition was supported and expanded by their legitimizing philosophy, with the aid of which chymical physicians could claim to have a means of accessing natural essences and thereby ignoring the limitations traditionally placed around the power of medicine.

Unearthing the essence of disease, as van Helmont’s followers noted, was the epistemic aim of a medical philosophy that he had built around the cure of disease, which required an acquaintance with the particulars of disease as encountered in medical practice. Van Helmont powerfully summarizes this commitment:

Seeing that nature appears or is discerned nowhere exhibit in individuals, there is need that I who shall write concerning disease be highly acquainted with the causes of particulars, just as it is necessary for a physician, under the charge of infernal punishment, to have examined those causes particularly. … If therefore the quiddity of diseases and the condition of morbific properties emanate out of their immediate, essential causes, necessarily also the knowledge of the aforesaid quiddity and condition must be taken out of the same causes, because the consideration of causes precedes the consideration of diseases.21

Thomson’s critique of anatomical investigation reveals many of the ways in which this theory of disease encouraged distinct approaches to knowing the body and treating illness. But he was not the only physician who cast doubt on the epistemic power of anatomical investigation. Other critiques of anatomy provide further opportunity to note the ways in which the Helmontian critique is distinct – and in particular, the ways in which Helmontian claims to authority through essential knowledge of the natural world necessitated subscription to a particular kind of medical epistemology.

21 van Helmont, “Tractatus de morbis. Introductio diagnostica,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 530: “Quapropter, cum natura nusquam, nisi in Individuis exsistat, aut cernatur: mihi de morbis scripturo, opus est particularium causas apprime novisse, prout et Medenti necessum, illas, sub reatu poenae infernalis, individualiter perspexisse. … Si ergo morborum quidditas, ac proprietatum morbidarum conditio, ex causis suis immediatis essentialibus profluant: necessario quoque praesatorum cognitio ex iisdem causis est desumenda. Eo quod consideratio causarum prior sit consideratione morborum.” See Chapter 3.

130 While Thomson’s critique of anatomy does follow from a distinctly Helmontian epistemology, there were similar critiques that originated from among the ranks of the Royal College of Physicians as well. One such RCP physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), was strongly influenced by the empiricist trends of the seventeenth century, and yet, in a treatise on dropsy, he proves highly skeptical of the epistemic power of anatomy.22 Dropsy is a potentially fatal illness identified with edema – that is, swelling from fluid retention – associated primarily with swelling in the legs and abdomen. The most obvious treatment for dropsy involved the prescription of purgatives to help void the excess fluid. However, in dropsy (as early modern physicians knew well) the fluid collects outside of the digestive system – in the case of dropsy’s strictly abdominal manifestation (called ascites), it collects outside of the stomach in the peritoneal cavity. If this fluid could be voided from the body through vomiting and diarrhea, then one had to concede that it was being conveyed into the digestive tract through imperceptible passages in the body. In his treatise on dropsy, Sydenham writes that he has no explanation for how fluid is transmitted from the abdominal cavity to be voided through the intestines. In the process of explaining why this knowledge is unnecessary for medical practice, he delivers a critique of anatomical investigation that appears at first to be nearly identical to the critique articulated by van Helmont and his followers:

So necessary is this knowledge [of anatomy], that he who wants it is like a man fighting blindfold, and a mariner without a compass. … Nevertheless, in all acute disease – and two-thirds are acute – we must fairly own that there is in in their nature Θεῑον τὶ – some specific property which no speculations deduced from the contemplation of the human frame will ever be enabled to discover and exhibit.23

22 Thomas Sydenham, “On Dropsy,” in The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D., translated from the Latin edition of Dr. Greenhill, with a life of the author, by R.G. Latham. 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1848-1850), pp. 163-184. Translated from “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Thomae Sydenhem, M.D., Opera Omnia, edited by William Alexander Greenhill. 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 455-478. Reprinted from Tractatus de Podagra et Hydrope (London, 1685 [1683]). For a brief biography of Thomas Sydenham, see: Harold J. Cook, “Sydenham, Thomas (bap. 1624, d. 1689),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online edition, 19 May 2011 [23 Sep. 2004]), at https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26864; and Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, pp. 308-314. 23 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, pp. 170-71; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 463: “Hujusmodi itaque humani corporis notitia omnino necessaria est, quam qui non habet, cum quibusdam morbis andabatarum (quod aiunt,) more pugnabit, aut sine nautica pyxide tentabit mare. … Veruntamen in acutis quibuslibet, (quod genus plus quam duas tertias morborum partes comprehendit,) atque porro in chronicis plerisque, omnino fatendum est τὶ Θεῑον inesse, sive speciﬁcam proprietatem aliquam, quam nulla unquam contemplatio a speculation corporis humani deducta queat indagare atque in lucem protrahere.”

131 Sydenham claims that although there must be passages within the body that allow fluid to drain into the digestive system from external cavities, it is not necessary to trace its path through the body in order to understand what medicines to apply (and how) and thereby address the swelling and alleviate the problem. In other words, this knowledge of minutiae is superfluous to therapeutics.

Sydenham’s critique of anatomy is part of his non-essentialist medical epistemology: he denies the possibility of obtaining knowledge of primary causes through the study of effects and the secondary causes they signify.24 Sydenham, like Thomson, quickly dismisses the possibility that a macroscopic investigation of the body as conducted in normal anatomical dissection would be capable of reaching to the ‘primary motions’ behind physiological function (or its pathological states), extending this critique to the invisible bodies exposed by the microscope: “What, however, neither human eye will see, nor microscope disclose, is the origin and primary cause of such movements [as are visible].”25 One might compare the anatomical investigation of the veins and their paths and intersections with the microscopic investigation of the blood or the tissue that it saturates. However microscopic this view, Sydenham insists that viewing the substance of the body cannot meaningfully contribute to knowledge of human health and illness. Sydenham concludes that essential knowledge of the body, or of the diseases that afflict it, is simply not necessary for practicing or improving medical therapeutics; the necessary knowledge, he asserts, follows from practical experience rather than philosophical speculation:

Now I am fully convinced that, for the formation of a right judgment on these matters, there is nothing so beneficial as the exact observation of the natural phenomena of the diseases themselves, then that of the effects of the juvantia and laedentia as ascertained by practice, and lastly, that of the remedies themselves, and of the method that we adopt in our exertions to drive off the disease.26

24 See: Alan Salter and Charles T. Wolfe, “Empiricism contra Experiment: Harvey, Locke and the Revisionist View of Experimental Philosophy,” Bulletin d'histoire et d'épistémologie des sciences de la vie 16, no. 2 (2009): 113-140. 25 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 171; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 464: “quae tamen hujus motus sit origo et causa primaria, oculi docere nequeunt, neque miscroscopium … potest detegere.” A particularly vocal critic in London of experimental philosophy and its instrument-aided investigation of nature was Margaret Cavendish; see: Ian Lawson, “Bears in Eden, or, this is not the garden you're looking for: Margaret Cavendish, Robert Hooke and the limits of natural philosophy,” The British Journal for the History of Science 48, no. 4 (2015): 583-605. 26 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 172; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 465: “Et quidem certissimus sum nihil aeque ad judicium hac in re rite formandum conferre, atque observationem exactissimam φαινοπένων naturalium et morborum, et partier eorum quae in praxis

132 Medical practice had to rely on particular knowledge and its inexactitude, and ultimately, knowledge of any particular illness had to be formed through the physician’s exchanges with his patients.

Galenists were clearly not so united as Helmontian polemics would like their readers to believe, but even when the opinions of humoral physicians converge with those of Helmontians, the Helmontian view of disease sets apart their medical agenda. When Johnson defended anatomical investigation against Thomson’s attacks, he claimed that anatomy was important not just in the bare necessities – that is, the general knowledge that everyone agreed was indispensable to medicine – but in improving the efficacy of existing therapeutics. While knowing the minutiae of the body’s passages may not be necessary to treat a patient, knowing more about them might be useful in improving how these treatments are carried out. This practical point founders when considered on the epistemological ground where critics positioned themselves. The most obvious point (to which Johnson is responding) is that these anatomical minutiae failed to prove useful in medical practice. But the real question, as we have seen, was whether anatomists were actually capable of opening the body in an epistemically significant way. Related criticisms of the microscope – which Sydenham includes in his critique of anatomy – joined a myriad of voices claiming that these practices did nothing to help us see beneath the surface of things: “All our knowledge – I speak respectfully – all our knowledge is gross and rough, dealing only with the outer husk of the things that we would know, ascertaining only, at its highest level, how things are, but by no means guessing why they are so.”27 Peering ever deeper into the body, uncovering surface after surface, would never uncover the essential meaning at the root of the effects made accessible by the senses – on this Sydenham and the Helmontians would agree.

For Helmontians, however, this meaning could be revealed through chymistry, when led by the guiding hand of divine grace. Uncompromising ambition was part of their chymical philosophy, and as we saw in Chapter 4, chymists broadly speaking were often accused of being dangerous because of their willingness to intervene when humoral physicians were unwilling to do so, in the process dispensing medicines of which even fellow chymists were often highly

cernuntur a juvantibus et laedentibus derivate, post ea sive remedia usurpata, sive etiam medendi methodum istam, quibus morbos depellere satagimus.” 27 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 171; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 464: “… cum rudis et indocta (sit verbo venia,) cognitio nostra in rerum cortice omnis ferme versetur, ac ad τὸ ὅτι (sive quod res hoc modo se habeat,) fere tantum assurgens, τό διότι (sive rerum causas,) nullatenus attingat.” On early modern microscopy and its critics, see Lawson, “Bears in Eden,” and Ian Lawson, “Crafting the microworld: how Robert Hooke constructed knowledge about small things,” Notes and Records 70, no. 1 (2016): 23-44.

133 suspicious. While Sydenham placed boundaries around the reach of human understanding, Helmontians redirected their epistemic ambitions into different practices. They agreed that anatomical investigation could not reach beneath the surface, but pyrotechnical anatomy could; pagan medicine could not reach for secrets kept by divinity, but this remained an open question for the hardworking, pious adept. Starkey’s quest for the alkahest was part of this claim to the epistemic power of pyrotechnical anatomy, which was part of how he distinguished himself as belonging to a chymical elite.

To Sydenham, chymists looked very much like anatomists when it came to epistemology; he condemned them alike for neglecting therapeutics in favor of indulging their curiosities:

Now, just as Hippocrates blamed those who, in their exceeding curiosity and officiousness, busied themselves more in speculations on the human frame than in practical observations upon the intentions of Nature, so may a prudent physician of the present time blame those who believe that medicine is to be promoted by the new chemical inventions of our day, more than any other process whatsoever.28

Taken individually, anatomy and chymistry could very well include efforts to increase knowledge within either practice, but when writers tied the authority of any kind of knowledge to its utility in medicine, they submitted these epistemic programs to more exacting criteria. In medicine, knowledge for knowledge’s sake was not justifiable; knowledge had to prove itself in practice. Chasing knowledge that failed this criteria was a waste of time in medical epistemology, and because human life was at stake, wasting time always held a moral inflection for physicians, who did not hesitate to include such moralizing in their polemical exchanges. By indulging their curiosities instead of refining their medical expertise, anatomists and chymists alike opened themselves to moral censure. Secrecy was therefore a difficult balancing act; one had to reveal enough to prove one’s expertise (and the value of this expertise) while convincingly teasing knowledge too privileged – or lucrative – to reveal in full.29

Claims to chymical arcana like the alkahest could be made by charlatans and legitimate chymists alike, and in Thomson’s case, invoking arcana actually provided a target for his opponents.

28 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 172; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 464: “Et sicuti Hippocrates eos reprehendit, qui huic in humanis corporibus speculandis curiositati et περιεργίᾳ plus dant quam observationibus practicis, ac proinde quam ipsius Naturae judicio; ita pari jure prudens vir quispiam in hoc nostro saeculo eos culpares possit, qui existimant Artem Medicam nulla re alia magic promoveri posse quam novis Chymicorum inventis.” 29 On secrecy in alchemy, see, e.g.: Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, pp. 141-46; and Newman, Gehennical Fire, pp. 62-78, on Starkey’s work specifically.

134 In his response to Galeno-Pale, Johnson finds Thomson’s ready claim to medical arcana to be the mark of an illegitimate chymist. Thomson may have found anatomical dissection to lack epistemic power, but his hostility to attempts to uncover the body’s secrets by literally removing its cover seemed to Johnson symptomatic of the pervasive secrecy that made self-described Helmontians such as Thomson untrustworthy. Johnson insists that “friends to truth, are like her, naked and unmaskt; they dare stand the test, nay, invite the severest, and most piercing eyes to be witnesses of their Faithfulness and industry.” 30 Whether or not physicians such as Thomson were mountebanks could never be truly determined, he argued, because their work was not transparent enough to invite judgment. In turn, however, Johnson’s inability to puzzle out the meaning of pyrotechnical anatomy would seem to Thomson to mark him as an insufficiently experienced chymist. The complex political tension between the Royal Society of London and the Royal College of Physicians would see some members of the latter throw barbs at Francis Bacon’s follows – that is, fellows of the Royal Society of London – for the same reason.31

Van Helmont’s understanding of disease justified a critique of anatomical investigation that Sydenham’s later work appears to echo, but the distinction between their medical philosophies extends from their opinions of chymical medicine to their theories of disease and ultimately, therapeutics. Sydenham’s ontological claims are restricted by his epistemology; he insists that essential knowledge of the natural world is not accessible to the human intellect, which means that medical practice cannot reasonably demand essential knowledge of disease. It is in this epistemological stance that one finds the most important divergence between Sydenham’s critique

30 Johnson, Agyrto-Mastix, p. 35. Johnson here claims that no one knows whether or not chymists are mountebanks, because they do not reveal their laboratory practices. In response, Thomson accepted a visit from Johnson to his laboratory, but the gesture back-fired; Johnson used this visit to gather more material for his invective against Thomson: Agyrto-Mastix, pp. 91-98, wherein Johnson concludes: “Thus furnisht, my Friend intends to venture at Helmonts Liquor Alkahest, and makes no doubt of getting the Philosophers Stone, but I fear the poor wretch will be gravell'd in his design in the conclusion.” Starkey defended Thomson on this count: George Starkey, “An epistolary Discourse to the Learned and Deserving Author of Galeno-Pale,” in Plano-pnigmos, by George Thomson (London, 1665), pp. 60-61. 31 For example, Aaron Mauck’s study of Christopher Merret, who belonged to both the Royal Society and the RCP, demonstrates just how unstable such divisions were at the time – and how this instability provided opportunities for medical reform, as we saw in the previous chapter. In this case, Merret endeavored to reform medicine through experimental practices and its philosophy, much in the way that chymical pharmacopoeia made its way into the College’s repertoire. Aaron Mauck, “‘By Merit Raised to That Bad Eminence’: Christopher Merrett, Artisanal Knowledge, and Professional Reform in Restoration London,” Medical History 56 (2012): 26-47. Charles Webster has noted that the RCP fellows engaged in a diverse range of activities later taken up by the RSL: “The College of Physicians: ‘Solomon’s House’ in Commonwealth England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41, no. 5 (1967): 393-412. However, humoral physicians often opposed themselves to experimental philosophy; see, e.g.: Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation to the Sweating- Sickness Examined, sig. A4r: “In representing of [Bacon's] faileurs, I thought I might deterr others from the like attempts, who are not Bacons, but Hogs, that yield much Cry, but no Wool.”

135 of anatomical investigation and that of his Helmontian contemporaries. In his treatise on dropsy, Sydenham insists that even if anatomists could reveal the minute passages that allowed dropsical fluid to drain into the digestive system, this information would reveal nothing about the essential character of the body’s operations and would be irrelevant to the application of medicaments that had already proven effective in practice. Precisely how the medicines did so was not important. Van Helmont – and later, his followers – disagreed.

On Dropsy: Van Helmont

In many ways, van Helmont provides the same responses to these questions addressed by Sydenham. In his treatise on dropsy, van Helmont also recommends purgatives while acknowledging that anatomy cannot reveal the passages by which the retained fluid is conveyed from interstitial cavities into the digestive system. Regardless, van Helmont’s medical philosophy is already equipped to demystify this motion. In his work on extraordinary vomiting, van Helmont mentioned the capacity for matter to be subordinated to spirit, allowing bodies to co-extend – that is, to occupy the same space. This provided a metaphysical explanation for the reality of the regurgitation of knives that accommodated such symptoms of demonic illness within natural mechanisms. In his treatise on dropsy, van Helmont refers in part to this discussion of the regurgitated knife in order to address the question of how fluid can pass through (or fail to pass through) barriers within the body.32 In the case of dropsy, the fluid which normally either moves through passages in the permeable body or passes through matter by virtue of its spiritual subtlety becomes trapped because of a morbific closing of the body’s pores and a stripping away of the vital spirit that can normally convey the fluid through the body regardless.33 A telling distinction here between Sydenham and van Helmont is that, while both deny the epistemic power of anatomical investigation, van Helmont is willing to supply alternate explanations whereas Sydenham finds such explanations irrelevant. In other words, van Helmont insists that a more complete knowledge of human illness is not only possible and practically attainable but also relevant to the essential character of the disease. This makes such knowledge, in his view,

32 van Helmont, “Ignotus hydrops,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 518: “In natura enim est duplex action, unascilicet, qua corpus corpore clauditur, ut vinum in lagena, et Aqua hydropica inter Peritonaeum et abdomen. Imo morbose pori clauduntur harum membranarum. Corpus enim perspirabile in sanitate […] Est et altera action regularis, et heteroclita in natura: per quam, alibi pluribus ostendi in nobis, corpus aliquod solidum (puta cultrum, aristam, acum, spicula, ossa, conchas atque similia) transmitti trans stomachum, uterum, venas, absque horum laesione aut vulnere. Adeoque in natura corporum, penetrationem solitam, et necessariam.” 33 van Helmont, “Ignotus hydrops,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 518-519.

136 necessary for the improvement of medical therapeutics, while Sydenham – who otherwise presents a parallel critique of anatomy – denies that essential knowledge is either accessible or necessary for effective medical practice.

Returning to dropsy, we can see how the subtle distinctions in their understanding of the disease ultimately led van Helmont and Sydenham to different conclusions about the appropriate treatment: ultimately, Sydenham insists that different medicines must be prescribed on a case-by- case basis, whereas van Helmont claims that all cases of dropsy can be resolved with the same medicine. In elaborating the theory behind the therapy, they both claim that edema signals a preceding problem in the body, but Sydenham’s explanation resembles a humoral theory that van Helmont invokes to argue against. Sydenham claims that dropsy results from an accumulation of serum deposited by weak blood; he therefore advises both the evacuation of the fluid and the strengthening of the blood to prevent the symptoms from returning. 34 In the humoral interpretation to which Sydenham at least in part subscribes, dropsy thus implicates the liver, which is tasked (among other things) with processing chyle into blood.35 It may have been obvious to early modern physicians that purgatives need to be prescribed to void the excess fluid (even if they were not entirely sure how the fluid was moving through the body), but van Helmont and Sydenham disagreed on why the fluid was accumulating and on what the fluid actually was.

According to van Helmont, autopsies were an extremely common request after death from dropsy, because it was a common belief (at least in the Spanish Netherlands where he practiced) that the disease could pass on to the heir of the deceased if the body were not properly divested of dropsical fluid.36 This occasioned van Helmont to obtain extensive experience with the internal transformations of bodies laid to rest by dropsy. Van Helmont uses these dissections to corroborate his interpretation of the disease and discredit that of the humorists, in much the same way that Thomson later described his dissection of a pestilential body as a confirmation of van

34 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, pp. 163-64; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 456: “Causa hujusce morbi in genere sanguinis debilitas est, unde alimento, quod forinscus importatur, in substantiam suam convertendo non jam par, idem in extremitates et pendulas corporis partes explodere necesse habet, mox in abdomen etiam; in quo, quamdiu in exiqua quantitate hinc inde dispergitur, Natura eidem continendo vesiculas quasdem fabricat, donec tandem, modum jam superans, uno peritonaeo simul clauditur.” And Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 165; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 457: “Indicationes curativae verae ac genuinae, utpote a praedictis phaenomenis naturaliter quasi exortae, vel ad aquarium in abdomine caeterisque partibus contentarum evacuationem, vel ad instaurandum sanguinis robur quo novus earundem proventus praecaveri possit, omnino dirigendae sunt.” 35 Cf. van Helmont, “Sextuplex digestio,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 211, wherein he opposes the claim in humoral theory that venal blood is made in the liver. 36 van Helmont, “Ignotus hydrops,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 510-511. Van Helmont mentions that he conducted the bulk of these dissections in the autumn of 1605, after returning to Antwerp from England.

137 Helmont’s theory of disease. 37 Because the humoral interpretation implicated the liver, van Helmont paid particular attention to its condition in the deceased and claimed that he did not consistently find perceptible damage to the liver in patients that died of dropsy; when he did find liver damage, he also found that it was possible to account for it with other factors unrelated to dropsy. Instead, he writes, the kidneys consistently presented damage after death from dropsy, and indeed he points to the kidneys rather than the liver in his explanation for the accumulation of fluid in dropsical patients.

Situating the root of dropsy in the kidneys instead of the liver was part of situating dropsy into van Helmont’s theory of disease. The liver was part of the humoral explanation because of its relation to the blood and the production of humoral fluid; van Helmont’s rejection of the humoral explanation naturally included the belief that the production of humoral fluid was not to blame, nor was the dropsical fluid an accumulation of unusable alimentative fluid. Van Helmont claims that the body does not produce enough blood for its phlegmatic component to accumulate in the large quantities responsible for dropsical swelling; pointing instead to the kidneys, he claims that dropsical fluid is an accumulation of a fluid he terms latex, which in a dropsical patient was not being processed into urine as it should have been. This mismanagement of the kidney’s normal operations (for the problem lay in the archeus) leads us to dropsy’s disease seed and its occasional causes for development. At the root of the disease is the usurpation of the kidney’s governing archeus, which sends latex to the abdomen under the influence of the disease seed instead of processing it into urine for excretion as would normally occur. This seed arises from a poisonous faculty of venal blood displaced through internal bleeding. Once communicated to one of the kidneys, this occasional cause inflames the archeus governing both kidneys (thus preventing urination) while also potentially destroying the kidney to which the displaced blood has been communicated.

Dropsy, which today is regarded more as a symptom than an illness in its own right, may not immediately recommend itself as a convincing candidate for evidencing van Helmont’s theory of disease. Nevertheless, van Helmont applies to it all of the identifying categories outlined in reference to more severe, contagious diseases such as the plague. Its occasional cause was a poisonous faculty of internally displaced venal blood; its material product was the accumulated latex in the peritoneal cavity; and its efficient cause was the corruption of the vital, archaeal principles responsible for the operation of the kidneys. This morbific usurpation was the disease itself. Voiding the fluid or even dissolving the displaced blood would therefore be an insufficient

37 See Chapter 4.

138 cure without also relieving the archeus of the disease seed that prompted it to engage in self- destruction:

Therefore the true ascites dropsy is in the kidneys. To loosen the obstinate bolt of the kidneys, is to loosen the dropsy: even as to loosen the congealed blood, is to loosen the occasional cause thereof. That is, the immediate cause of a true dropsy, material as well as efficient, is the errant archeus of the kidneys, so far as it is certainly exorbitant, and as though driven into a rage by an occasional cause, it begets an idea or image [speciem], which the kidneys’ innate archeus himself willfully fosters and nourishes: through which the archeus in no way or just barely separates urine or otherwise carries out the administration of its office, or if you will, its designated end. Indeed nor does it only disregard and neglect its own duties: in fact it furthermore, as though in a rage, dismisses latex to the abdomen, so that it may administer its own destruction.38

While one may be tempted to characterize van Helmont’s dropsy as a dysfunction of the kidneys, the retention of latex in the abdomen forms a morbific operation that actually replaces the kidney’s normal operations. Rather than simply obstructing the kidney’s normal function, which was the processing of latex into urine for excretion, dropsy redirects the kidneys’ archeus to engage in morbific activities. The occasional cause is also noteworthy, partly because it is internal but also because it is venal blood that becomes poisonous by being displaced within the body. This is of course an important part of how van Helmont understands what is natural and unnatural to the body; the venal blood, which is a vital part of the body’s normal operations, becomes unnatural and indeed pathological when it is displaced in the body. That nature-out-of-place quality of the blood, in this case, reflects the broader quality of disease as having its own nature that is unnatural to the body in which it develops. Understood in relation to van Helmont’s notion of innate sympathy – of the self-love that drives self-preservation – disease instates an opposing drive for self-destruction. Dropsy, even though it may present as a mere symptom secondary to disease, is given just such an identity in van Helmont’s works.

38 van Helmont, “Ignotus hydrops,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 515: “Ergo verus hydrops Ascites, est in Renibus. Sive, solvere pertinacem seram Renum, est solvere hydropem: pro ut solvere cruorem congelatum, est solvere causam occasionalem eius. Id est, causa immediate, tam materialis, quam efficiens, veri hydropis, est Archeus Renum errans, quatenus scilicet exorbitant, ac in furorem velut percellitur a causa occasionali, Ideam gignit, sive speciem, quam ipse insitus Renum Archeus contumax fovet, atque alit: per quam scilicet non; aut vix separate urinam, aut cura illi incumbit sui officii, suaeve destinationis. Imo nec solum sua munia praeterit atque negligit: quin etiam velut furiosus dimittit laticem ad abdomen, ut sui velut internecionem procuret.”

139 In their treatises on dropsy, Sydenham and van Helmont describe very different diseases in the details, and this difference is ultimately reflected in therapeutics as well – more specifically, in the generality of their recommended medicines. While both physicians treat patients suffering from fluid retention in the peritoneal cavity and they both do so with purgatives, Sydenham’s recommended prescriptions are keyed to the notion of individual complexion, which rests upon a disease theory in which disease has no ontology distinct from the body in which it manifests. The manifestation of the disease in an individual requires that treatment be specific to that individual, even if the symptoms indicate a recognizable genus of illness. For this reason, Sydenham’s treatise lists multiple potential medicaments intended to be prescribed according to the patient’s circumstance.39 In line with his theory of the blood, Sydenham insists that the medicine should act quickly and aggressively to avoid weakening the blood further through a less effective, prolonged strain on the body. He advises buckthorn before recommending increasingly aggressive purgatives, listing crocus metallorum as one of the strongest, to be used in cases where the patient is exceptionally resistant to the effects of weaker purgatives.40

This last-resort medicine was so-called because of the primary ingredient: antimony. This metal has both emetic and cathartic effects on the body, that is, it induces purging from both ‘above and below.’ Antimony is also the primary ingredient in the medicine that van Helmont recommends most highly; however, he does not recommend the same preparation of antimony. Thomson, for instance, has the following to say of the medicine recommended by Sydenham:

The most usual, safe, and best Vomit (in their account) is borrowed from Antimony, called Infusio Croci Metallorum, and yet this acts but uncertainly in the carrying off the morbifick matter, for wanting its due alteration and correction, it causes sometimes no small discommodity in malignant Feavers; moreover, their Method will not suffer them to use it aright; not knowing when, how often, nor to whom it may be given with any confidence, that an Euphoria or alleviation may follow …41

An important distinction between van Helmont’s medicine and that of Sydenham – aside from the geographical and temporal reasons for their recipes to differ – is that van Helmont recommends the same aggressive remedy for all cases of dropsy, whereas Sydenham reserves antimony only for extreme cases. This can be explained partly by the ways in which they hold

39 Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 459-462. 40 Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 461: “Restant vero medicamenta duo (me judice,) palmaria, et, in iis qui non nisi aegre purgantur, caeteris quae vel supra enumeravi vel adhuc comperta habeo δραστικώτερα; elaterium intelligo, et infusionem croci metallorum.” 41 Thomson, Galeno-Pale, p. 73.

140 different views of their responsibilities as physicians and of their goals in medical practice. Van Helmont lists multiple remedies effective in voiding excess fluid from the body (including the ever- useful toad and simply thirst), but he did not consider voiding the fluid to be a cure for the disease.42 There was also the occasional cause (the displaced blood) to remove as well as the archeus to consider. Even remedies that could dissolve the blood responsible for communicating the disease to the archeus would be insufficient should they prove incapable of strengthening the archeus against the morbific idea that had taken hold of it. Therefore, his criteria were perhaps more restrictive, but the result was a single remedy that he could justifiably recommend for all cases of dropsy.

The apparent resemblance between the Helmontian critique of anatomical investigation and that of Sydenham is therefore only superficial. While both denied that anatomical investigation was capable of granting access to the hidden operations of nature, Sydenham comprehensively denied the human capacity to understand the essential causes of disease. His take on the epistemic relation between theory and practice was strongly empiricist:

… the steady observation of phenomena has been my instructor … Hence it was from the phenomena that I took my hypothesis. In this way the philosopher and the empiric go hand-in-hand. Had I begun with my hypotheses, I should have shown the same want of wisdom that a builder would show who began with the roof and tiles, and ended with the basement and foundation. But it is only those who build castles in the air that may begin at either end indifferently.43

Helmontians were more ambitious (or reckless, depending on the writer); their laboratories were important sites of experimental practice – and experimental confirmation – that granted them access to natural essences. Sydenham’s empiricism cast the causes of disease as disease itself; for van Helmont, the causes of disease instead formed a pathway to knowledge that promised uncompromised power over illness.44 Thus occasional causes, such as displaced blood in the

42 van Helmont, “Ignotus hydrops,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 519-520. 43 Sydenham “On Dropsy,” in The Works, p. 173; Sydenham, “Tractatus de Hydrope,” in Opera Omnia, p. 465-66: “… ex hac aliisque φαινοπένων naturalium observationibus hypothesin meam desumpsi, ita ut philosophus empirico hic famularetur. Quod si ab hypothesi coepissem, ea plane ratione insanirem atque ille qui tabulata tignaque domus superiora prius velit erigere quam fundamentum jecerit: quod quidem istis tantum convenit qui in aëre castella (quod aiunt,) solent extruere; his enim certo quodam privilegio ab alterutra extremitate licet ordiri.” 44 Harold Cook has noted that this empiricist trend in early modern medicine played an important role in establishing confidence amidst contending medical theories: Harold J. Cook, “Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, eds. Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 9-32.

141 kidneys, could serve as seamarks in the hunt for essential knowledge of diseases. The alkahest promised to circumvent the need to reveal the unseen motions of the archeus, but even if one could not obtain the alkahest, the manifestations of disease provided a way to arrive at an understanding of disease essences sufficient for developing their individual cures.

Curing Generally

One can follow van Helmont’s line of sight, as Starkey did, to medicine at its most ambitious, where it offered theoretical foundations for the chymical search for a universal cure. But Starkey does not attempt to market the alkahest as a practical answer to the problems faced by practicing physicians. In general, he identified two classes of medicaments: “Medicines therefore vvhich are truly vvorthie to be so called, are of tvvo sorts; either specifick, or universal, that is, precisely applicable to some fevv diseases, or universally povverful in all cases.”45 Medical practice kept this quest for a universal cure practical. Van Helmont maintains that most therapeutics should proceed according to what can be learned of the secondary causes of disease; treating these secondary causes is often all that is necessary in order to return a patient to health. In spite of Starkey’s long labor for the alkahest – and his various successes – he did not carry a universal medicine when he visited an ill Thomson in 1665; he carried with him toads instead. It must be noted that Starkey had also contracted the plague before he visited Thomson, and Thomson writes that Starkey had administered similarly specific remedies to himself as those he brought for Thomson. If ever Starkey were to utilize his knowledge of chymical arcana, it might have been in 1665, to save his own life. Instead, practitioners like Starkey mostly focused their therapeutics on the treatment of specific diseases rather than aiming for their shared root. Of medicines with a more straight- forward preparation specific to particular diseases, uncompounded remedies were easier to prepare, could be made with more readily available reagents, and required less labor to produce. This made them less expensive as well, which aside from being a professional concern, fed into ethical issues at the heart of medical practice that were often invoked in printed polemics.46 But

45 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, p. 14. 46 Chymical physicians often asserted their moral superiority by emphasizing the inefficacy of humoral medicine alongside the fees charged by its practitioners. Van Helmont, describing his dismay as a young physician and his turn to chymical medicine, writes, “Sane puduit me, vel ab adolescente, quod operarius, vocatus ad opus, illud promitteret, staretque promissis. Ego vero ad infirmum, initio morbi, et constantibus adhuc sibi viribus, vocatus, eundem interire permitterem,” in “Promissa authoris,” in Ortus medicine, p. 11. Elsewhere he writes in more vivid terms: “medici excusationes quaeritant, et terra culpam eorum texit,” in “Pharmacopolium ac dispensatorium modernorum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 467. This phrasing was then taken up by Starkey: “the earth covers their defects,” in: George Starkey, Natures explication and Helmont's vindication. Or A short and sure way to a long and sound life (London, 1657), p. 29.

142 this practicality did not negate the impact of universal medicine on chymical therapeutics. On the one hand were degrees of generality in medicine which influenced the synthesis and prescription of medicines. On the other was the way in which the belief alone changed the relation of the physician to his practice.

In terms of general and specific medicines, Thomson played both fronts, touting the limitless potential of chymical medicine while simultaneously promoting the practicality and affordability of his services to the everyday patient, who could expect to be treated with specific medicines. Altruism was an important part of presenting oneself as a good physician. There are echoes of this priority in the accusations leveled against Galenists for following wealthy clients out of London during the plague outbreak, and Thomson likewise insisted, in defense of the Society of Chymical Physicians, that the members of their society sought no remuneration from the crown.47 Among the plague remedies advertised in his Loimologia, Thomson recommends three of his chymical medicines specifically for “malignant fevers,” among them his Tinctura polyacaea, the medicine that in Loimotomia he claimed to have taken in a quadruple dose after contracting the plague.48 He does claim, however, that this remedy has more generalized applicability as well:

The name I appropriate to the liquor, is Tinctura Polyacaea, from the excellent vertue it hath of preventing and healing many Maladies, according to my long observation of it. It Corroborates the Stomack and its ferment; enliveneth and invigorates the Archeus, the vital Spirit, being circulated with the blood into all parts: It mortifies malignant Atoms, enabling nature to profligate and expel the poison of the Plague by sweat, cleansing away the morbifick matter by Expectoration and Urine.49

Thomson understood the stomach to be the origin of diseases and the seat of the archeus, which made it also the seat of the body’s vital functions. Any remedy capable of bolstering the natural strength of the stomach and its resident archeus would be capable of strengthening the body against the germination of seminal diseases in general, which would support Thomson’s claim that this tincture was a widely effective therapeutic and prophylactic beyond its use in expelling the

47 Thomson, Loimologia, p. 15. 48 Thomson, Loimotomia, pp. 85-86. He describes his chosen therapy in full: “The Remedies that I took in a Quintuple quantity for what others took, was Tinctura Polyacaea, and no small portion of Pulvis Pestifugus. Touching the Diet I observed, it was good spirituous liquors, as the best Wine, and Strong Beer sweetned with a little sugar, also now and then I drank a draught of White-wine Posset: as for Galenical Juleps, Small beer, Barly water, muccaginous Decoctions, Broths, satiated with the crude juice of Ingredients, I detested; for I knew they would annoy my stomach, and so hinder the Archeus from conquering the poyson, which upon every irritating occasion was ready to ferment.” 49 Thomson, Loimologia, p. 3.

143 ‘poisonous’ matter that carried the seeds of the plague. Like all medicines with a generalized application, this one strengthened the archeus through purification. More limited remedies had some specificity – such as Tinctura Polyacaea’s efficacy against malignant fevers – which made these more obtainable levels of generality in therapeutics limited to classes of diseases rather than diseases in kind. An imperfectly purified medicine could only imperfectly purify the archeus of foreign influence – and, seemingly, only of specific kinds of foreign influences – while only a medicine capable of perfected purification, such as the alkahest, would be capable of serving as a perfectly effective medicine in this framework.

The concept of disease in the Helmontian system was important for these distinctions, but its metaphysical nuances also impacted the expectations of the Helmontian physician and his interpretation of the manifestations of illness. Disease in van Helmont’s interpretation fundamentally differs from disease in the academic sense because it is a perversion of the body’s natural faculties rather than a natural result of their operation. When Thomson refers to disease in the Galenic understanding as “privation,” he indicates on the one hand the notion of disease as bodily state. On the other hand, this includes the assumption that the body naturally tends to pathological states; health must be carefully maintained through regulation of lifestyle, environment, and so on, under the guidance of a physician. The Galenic point of view (in the Helmontian interpretation of it) presents disease as naturally occurring unless avoided through regimen, and as a result, there is no fundamental distinction between death from the onset of disease and death from old age. From the Helmontian’s own perspective, these two kinds of death differ metaphysically: death from old age is an inherited mortality caused by deterioration of the body that takes place when the body is functioning according to its native directives.50 Disease, on the other hand, is a positive ens that is necessarily unnatural to the body that it invades. If it brings about death, it is as a result of the destructive effects produced by the archeus when it is subjugated to foreign formal directives.

50 van Helmont, “Mortis Introitus in Naturam Humanum Decus Virginum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 646: “Nam ex quo momento homo fecit intra se semen ad suae specie propagationem, adumbravit (saltem dispositive) eadem opera, occasionaliter primordia animae caducae, tegumentum et involucrum Mentis, ut totum corporis ministerium in se susciperet. […] Adeoque in pomo erat vis producendi semen prolificans, brutalique more seminalem Archeum dispositivum foetus continens, animamque caducam a datore vitae sibi impetrans. Eadem enim die, qua de fructu arboris scientiae boni et mali ederent, morte morerentur, quia animae sensitivae appulsu facta fuit altera novaque generatio, propter quam Mens consternata sese a vitae clavo subtraxit. In hoc scilicet stabat mortis et immortalitatis necessitas.” This means that the seeds upon which sexual generation depends (and which humans did not have before the Fall of Man) supply the duration of mortal life, and in doing so pass on the legacy of sin through generations. See also “De tempore,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 632-33, wherein van Helmont describes the duration of life as dependent upon seeds.

144 This distinction – and especially van Helmont’s conception of natural vitality and processes of life and death – sheds yet more light on the relation between disease and the body. The seminal idea that gives shape and purpose to matter and material processes is also consumptive: natural processes of life are fuelled by the body itself, which eventually deteriorates. Death, therefore, is the natural end of life in the fallen state. Health is instated by the normal processes of the archeus, including the inevitable deterioration that this normal functioning involves. Diseases, which always retain metaphysical distinction from the body and are therefore unnatural to it, can always in theory be expelled, even though natural death is inevitable. Aging cannot be considered disease, and natural death cannot be avoided, even with the aid of powerful chymical medicines. Therefore, while van Helmont rejects the Paracelsian claim that life can be extended indefinitely through chymical medicine, he does insist that, in principle, there is no such thing as an incurable disease.51

Perfecting Knowledge

On 26 January 1651, George Starkey wrote to Robert Boyle about a breakthrough he had achieved in his quest for the alkahest:

I know well enough what the alkahest is, and I gathered this from its effects both from Paracelsus and from Van Helmont, but it was from the Father of Lights that I brought about the preparation of the thing itself. I know, I know, I know, for I have seen, done, and labored, nor indeed would I say this unless I knew.52

Van Helmont’s medical philosophy was built variously in the laboratory, in the clinic, in his office, and finally, in dreams. Much as van Helmont’s explication of seminal disease could be interpreted as supporting materialist interpretations of natural generation, his extensive recordings of dreams and visions are often taken to be secondary to his practical injunctions and the medicines that he describes.53 But while elements of van Helmont’s work could be taken and incorporated into new

51 van Helmont, “Arbor vitae,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 795. Van Helmont claims that the human lifespan has been restricted to 120 years since the fall of man. This is the “long life” he speaks of attaining in other treatises, since at his time, he says, the normal human lifespan was 80 years. Cf. “Vita longa, ars brevis,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 642-44; “Vita,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 736-38; and “Arcana Paracelsi,” in Ortus medicinae, pp. 785-791. 52 Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, p. 67 for both the cited English translation and the original Latin: “Sat novi quid sit Alkahest, idque tam ex Paracelso quam Helmonte in effectis collegi, at a Patre Luminum rei ipsius fabricam impetravi. Novi, novi, novi, quia vidi feci, & sum Elaboratus, nec hoc sane dicerem nisi scirem.” 53 See, e.g.: Berthold Heinecke, “The Mysticism and Science of Johann Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644),” Ambix 42 (1995): 65-78.

145 philosophical interpretations – much as Johnson insists – a ‘true disciple’ seeking to preserve the framework of his philosophy would be hard-pressed to disregard the epistemic necessity of divine grace and the clarity imparted by it in dreams and visions. In obtaining such illumination, van Helmont delineated the capabilities of the physician in the same way that he did for medical therapeutics. In either instance, control was granted not directly but through influence over the conditions under which the desired state could be reached. Medical therapeutics could not surpass the capabilities of the archeus, and illumination could only be supplicated, not demanded. For this reason, van Helmont describes taking part in fasting, vigils, contemplation, and even some chymical experimentation to manipulate the intervention of the senses in accessing intellectual clarity.54 Far from being distinct from his scientific work, this perfecting of knowledge was an indispensable part of it.

As Starkey wrote in January of 1651, he relied on the descriptions left by Paracelsus and van Helmont to recognize properties of the alkahest as he sought to synthesize it. He followed scant textual clues to determine the substances to work upon, but he attributes his knowledge of the method to an ineffable understanding imparted in a divine dream. In his letter to Boyle, Starkey wrote that he would have been incapable of puzzling out the synthesis of the alkahest without divine guidance:

… to have prepared this would be a matter of massive labor, for I confess that even if I had studied my whole life, I could not have found it without the immediate finger of God. For to explain the method of the operations would have kept all the philosophers in the world busy forever, for they are so unusual and outside the regular course that hardly anything like them could come to mind.55

In his treatise on the prolongation of life, van Helmont wrote that the alkahest was “not given to those who think but only to those who know, and indeed, only to those who know twofold.”56

54 At least once, van Helmont ingested chymically processed wolfsbane in order to aid in divine illumination, working from the premise that powerful poisons possessed powerful beneficial effects before the Fall of Man: “Demens Idea,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 279. Cf. “Venatio scientiarum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 26: “Sub qua, semel dein, dudum illam in Phantasia aspiciens, ac velut eandem alloquens, tandem studio insigniter fatigatus, obdormivi, ut eius somnialem saltem visionem excitarem, per quam eruerem desiderabile illius scibile. Juxta illud: Nox nocti indicat scientiam: Ac mirum sane, quantum luminis, eiusmodi visiones, mihi recluserint, praecipue non bene dudum antea pasto corpore.” 55 Starkey, Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, p. 68: “Et sanè scio quod hoc parasse sit ingentis operae, profiteor namque quod utut studuerim per vitam, nisi immediato Dei digitu non poteram reperisse, Operationum enim rationem reddere omnes in mundo Philosophos in aeternum faveret sollicitos, suntque tam inordinatae, extr^a^que cursum usualem, quod vix aliquid simile in mentem veniret.” 56 Van Helmont, “Arbor vitae,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 799: “Sed quid? Requiritur Alkahest. Quod non datur putantibus: sed solis scientibus, et quidem duplatis.”

146 This passive language referred obliquely to what he more explicitly states elsewhere: that a full understanding of the secrets of nature can only be granted through divine illumination. Together with laboratory experimentation and textual exegesis, dreams provided the final breakthrough.

In his Ortus, van Helmont clearly laid out this path as necessary to unlocking the secret of the alkahest, claiming as Starkey dutifully related that while its production could be experimentally confirmed, its proof existed beyond demonstration. This epistemic gap preserved a place for the chymical elect, the only ones who could arrive at knowledge of the method of synthesizing the alkahest – and only through divine inspiration. Declining to explicate the alkahest’s synthesis, van Helmont says, “I shall leave the manifestation of that arcanum to the treasure chamber of divine favor.”57 As he insists elsewhere, the alkahest was a powerful chymical tool that was difficult to make and perhaps even more difficult to learn how to make: “Seeing that it is of a most tedious preparation, no one, although having knowledge of the art, shall reach to the attainment of it, whom the Highest does not guide by a special gift.”58 Starkey, like van Helmont, made this breakthrough in his dreams, but only after first following the clues that enabled him to understand them. This, then, was the injunction that Starkey left to his own readers when writing of the path to knowledge of the alkahest:

I know the next question will be, how may this Liquour be attained? to which I answer with Helmont, That it is not sufficient to turn over Books, but Coals and Glasses must be bought, and night after night must be spent: So Helmont did, so I have done, and still continue to do, and so thou must doe, whoever wouldest attain these Secrets, I have done my part, taught the διότι of the thing, and so have started a game for any one that is curious to hunt: but for the thing it self, and the practical skill, it is Gods blessing onely, and each mans particular Endeavours, that must give that: studie therefore, and take pains, and together with prayer to God join constant labour in the Fire, thus with Gods blessing will you find what I by the same means have found.59

Starkey writes that he was provided what he can in writing – the dioti or theory – and that the rest must be hunted through labor. Sydenham had placed this dioti beyond medicine, but once again

57 van Helmont, “De lithiasi,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 68: “Itaque me deserturum illius Arcani manifestationem thesauris beneplaciti divini.” Cf. “De lithiasi,” p. 63. 58 van Helmont, “De lithiasi,” in Opuscula medica inaudita, p. 80: “Qui cum sit taediosissimae praeparationis, nemo, etsi artis gnarus fuerit, ad eius consecutionem perveniet, quem Altissimus, speciali dono, non eo deduxerit.” 59 Starkey, Pyrotechny asserted, p. 93.

147 Helmontian medicine instructs physicians to begin where others have stopped. This hunt undertaken by the Helmontian physician is guided by theory and has an aim that is, in practice, potentially beyond reach: essential knowledge of natural substances, including diseases and their cures. But the importance is the hunt itself. This is the point of van Helmont’s hunting of sciences: the labor for essential knowledge, which depends upon the particulars encountered in practice and its perfection, which can only be granted by divine grace. Van Helmont’s medical ontology, framed by the demonic, set the terms of this hunt.

Dispossessing the Demon

Van Helmont’s theory of disease is the key to untangling the complex of ideas, practices, and circumstances that justified Starkey’s attempts to synthesize a universal cure of disease. Before all diseases could be submitted to a single natural cure, disease first had to be made distinct from its human subject and assigned universal modes of entering, conceiving in, and developing in the body. Van Helmont’s interpretation of disease bridged the expansive claims of chymical medicine with the magical ambition to render manifest the occult operations in the natural world and to exercise influence over these operations to grand effect. The theory alone could be enough: whether or not the alkahest was obtained by any of his followers, the belief that it was obtainable was enough to change the relation between Helmontain physicians and their medical practices. This is just one demonstration of how van Helmont’s concept of the pathological shaped a new understanding of disease and thereby redefined the extent of the physician’s capabilities, the shape of his practice, and ultimately, his place in the world – both natural and social. It was in this context that the alkahest became a perfectly rational subject for research.

When van Helmont wrote about ways of knowing in his Venatio scientiarum, he acknowledged what could only be possible through a divine confluence of the mind and the divine image within the human soul. This image was the same that empowered all magical action, including any efficacy exercised by demonic agents within the natural world or the human body, as well as that which supplied the essential ideas of disease when they arose from internal causes. This image was also the source of understanding that made essential knowledge of nature accessible. Much as the physician might be said to cure the body by removing the destructive influence of foreign entities that did not belong there, so the process of accessing essential knowledge involved a purifying of experience through a suppression of the sensitive soul and its inherently corrupt influence on human understanding. It is for this reason that van Helmont begins his Venatio scientiarum with

148 the following epigraph: Venatio scientiarum, incipit a nosce te ipsum.60 The hunt for knowledge begins with knowing oneself.

The promises enabled by the redrawing of nature’s boundaries amounted to no less than a (carefully justified) mastery of the natural world. While nature itself could be counted the real physician and physicians themselves merely its servants, van Helmont writes that

when [nature] has surrendered, such that it cannot revive its strength, a physician chosen by the favor of the Lord, and with whom all diseases are nearly of the same worth (indeed such is he who has obtained some universal medicine, among many of equal measure) – he remains no longer a servant: but a powerful interpreter, ruler, and master.61

Where once the demon occupied a pre-eminent position in the natural world, van Helmont proposed that such a seat of power could only be granted by divinity to its image, in human beings. It was this same divine image that van Helmont made to impart the specificity of distinct entities, in which he located the source of perfected knowledge, and that he positioned behind the efficacy of magic. It was the imagination that mediated its expression in the natural world, and through the perverse will that could be imparted to and conceived in the imagination, van Helmont found the expression of the pathological. Disempowering the demon was therefore not a disenchantment of nature but a process in which the demon was dispossessed of his position in the natural world, allowing van Helmont to claim access to the hidden operations of nature not merely as accessible to human knowledge and to human influence but as a human birthright. The promise that one could follow the spoor of disease to the knowledge of its essence – and thereby exercise all necessary power to eliminate it – was a promise negotiated with the demon.

60 van Helmont, “Venatio scientiarum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 20. 61 van Helmont, “Catarrhi delirementa,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 427: “At ubi succubuit, ut suis resurgere viribus nequeat, Medicus a Domini benignitate electus, et apud quem omnes morbi fere eiusdem sunt pretii, (talis enim est, qui aliquam universalem Medicinam, inter plures eius ce modi, nactus est) manet non amplius minister: sed interpres, Rector, et herus praepotens.”

149 CONCLUSION

Quería soñar un hombre: quería soñarlo con integridad minuciosa e imponerlo a la realidad. Jorge Luis Borges

There is a final guest that we can consider in the works of van Helmont. Appearing in Venatio scientiarum, this strange guest takes the form of reason:

The mind having remembered that divine word, that those of his house are his enemies, conceived a nausea over reason. … Thereupon, the soul began to think no longer of reason as a part or power of itself, but as like unto a strange guest, plainly detached and neither from the essence of the mind. And afterwards, the soul knew by faith, that once being separated from the body, it will no longer be in need of reason, which is fallen and mortal – indeed, and to have come to us with death, in the corruption of nature.1

Reason, like disease, is a strange guest. Is reason, then, a demonic intruder in the mind? In a way – reason entered nature in the same moment as disease, and therefore it is tied to human mortality at the same point. Like an epistemic corruptor, it subverts understanding. This is not to say that van Helmont’s philosophy is irrational. Rather, it speaks to the disquiet of the age and its rapidly transforming world, wherein accepted forms of rationality were beginning to decay and grow into new forms.

In Helmontian medicine, the demon looms large when he appears and otherwise lurks invisibly behind concepts in which he seems to have no part to play. The invisible hand of the demon therefore reaches beyond the medical ontology that it serves to construct in van Helmont’s works. While the terms of van Helmont’s theory of disease may have their provenance in the philosophical works of other radical physicians, the significance of his innovations arises in what he brings to bear from the demon: an ontology existing in the gap between the foreign and the familiar. It can be claimed with certainty that the concept of disease that van Helmont bequeathed – and the theories and practices following from it – takes shape in this relation.

1 Van Helmont, “Venatio scientiarum,” in Ortus medicinae, p. 21: “Recordataque mens verbi divini, quod domestici eius sint inimici eius, nauseam super Ratione concepit. … Inde ergo, initio coepit anima Rationem, non amplius ut partem, aut potestatem sui, contemplari; sed velut peregrinam hospitem, ab esse mentis, plane decisam, atque neutram. Idque postquam anima, per fidem sciret, se a corpore semel separatam, non amplius rationis indigam: hanc proinde esse caducam, mortalemque; imo et cum morte nobis advenisse, in naturae corruptione.” 150

The reading of early modern demonology as an exploration of inversion speaks to just such relations. Van Helmont’s works are not so much heterodox as concerned with the heterodoxy of nature: its corruptions, perversions, and indeed its pathology. These heterodoxies shape nature by defining its parameters. In the present context, however, an intense difficulty lies in connecting nature with its inverted forms. In what capacity could disease be familiar enough to take shape out of the body’s own archeus – or even to arise within from mere conceptions – and yet be fundamentally unnatural to the body? This is, of course, the trick of the demon, playing out in the deception through which he initially meets face-to-face with human beings. At once extraordinary yet familiar, the recognition then turns into alarm. Just so, a foreign will that passes the threshold of the imagination can impose itself on the body’s faculties and wrest away their control. This loss of control to the will of a strange guest articulates that unique form of alienation shared by encounters with disease and encounters with the demon – that is, the alienation of the body from itself. Van Helmont’s pathology thus clearly emerges from that which makes (and originally made) the body foreign to human nature.

151

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