An Alchemical Quest for Universal Knowledge

History of science credits the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) for his contributions to the development of chemistry and medicine. Revealing Van Helmont as an original thinker who sought to produce a post-Scholastic synthesis of religion and natural philosophy, Georgiana Hedesan reconstructs his ques

Autorentext
Georgiana D. Hedesan is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical History and Humanities at University of Oxford, working on a research project on the quest for universal medicine and radical prolongation of life in seventeenth-century alchemy (2013-2016). Prior to this, she held a short-term Cantemir Junior Fellowship at University of Oxford and a Frances A. Yates fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London. A PhD in History from University of Exeter (2012), she is the author of several articles and reviews in scholarly journals dealing with Paracelsus, Van Helmont and alchemy, including articles published in Medical History and Ambix, as well as chapters in books either published or to be published by University of Chicago Press, Ashgate and Routledge.

Inhalt

Contents: Preface; Part I Van Helmont in Context: The medical alchemical background of Van Helmont's Christian philosophy; Van Helmont's life; Van Helmont's Ortus Medicinae and some of its problems. Part II The Principles of Van Helmont's 'Christian Philosophy': God; Nature; Man; Applied philosophy: alchemy and medicine; General conclusions; Appendix: list of chapter-treatises in Ortus Medicinae; Bibliography; Index.