Immaginazione e malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont (review)

Guido Giglioni. Immaginazione e malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont. Filosofia e scienza nel Cinquecento e nel Seicento. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2000. 187 pp. L 32,000.00 (paperbound, 8-846-42286-4).

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

The present volume, by a philosopher teaching the history of ideas at the University of Macerata, Italy, and a graduate student in the Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at Johns Hopkins University, follows a different approach. Guido Giglioni focuses on the main theme of Van Helmont's medical philosophy: his fundamental belief that the intellect--the image of God--rather than reason, should be the light guiding man in search of truth. This, unfortunately, results in a persistent ambivalence between knowledge acquired through chemical findings (primarily by investigating fire in its multifarious aspects) and knowledge acquired intuitively through the intellect (cogitatio intellectualis).

Imagination, as indicated in the very title of Giglioni's book, plays a central role in Van Helmont's view of medicine: the etiological primacy attributed to the impetus of passions, located in the hypochondriac area (stomach, spleen, uterus); imagination's ability to influence the mind (notably in the fear of contracting plague) to the point of insanity--stemming from the hypochondria, not the brain, and explaining why the mentally ill patient is unaware of his own condition; disease occurring when the process of inner morbidity, rooted in the imagination, is wrongly attributed to external factors (objectum alienum). The essence of the healing process, thus, rests in the conviction (fides) of recovery and in self-confidence (confidentia); in cases of mental illness, the forceful and sedating words of the therapeutic agent constitute a very effective curative procedure.

Death occurs in man because of the original fall; it is a degeneration of a generation, on the assumption that the original sin is hereditary as a result of sexual degradation. Man's aspiration to immortality, rather than attempting to prolong life with the help of medicine, should rely on a complete abandonment to the will of God.

The value of Giglioni's book lies in his attempt to overcome the traditional narrow chemical interpretation of Van Helmont's work by placing it, instead, in the wider perspective of his Christian worldview. This is accomplished by the author's scholarly approach in grasping the essence of Van Helmont's message through a thorough perusal of his writings, from which the key passages, often quite lengthy, are given in English translation--a feature undoubtedly appreciated by any reader of the book. In so doing, Giglioni has succeeded in stressing Van Helmont's basic medical tenets, at times presaging modern concepts of the global approach to the patient.

 

George Mora
Yale University

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