Marcello Donato was a distinguished medical practitioner of the city of Mantua, Northeastern Italy, who died about the year 1600. He was one of the few who, at that early period, taught that it was very important to study disease from nature—i.e., from direct observation—and not from books. His description of the epidemic of small-pox of 1567 (published at Mantua in 1569) is worthy of commendation. His chief work, however, is that which bears the title “De medica historia mirabili etc.” (Mantua, 1586.) It contains a remarkably large and complete collection of rare and extraordinary cases belonging to every department of medicine, and in his descriptions Donato pays particular attention to the pathologico-anatomical aspects of each case. He reports, for example, the instance of a Caesarian section performed on a living woman in 1540 by Christopher Bain; the child being found dead. Another interesting case reported by Donato is that of a child in whose ear a cherry pit had been allowed to remain undisturbed until it began to sprout; after which it was found easy to remove the impacted object. In a somewhat similar case which Donato also reports, the sprouting of the seed of Anagyris was hastened by the presence of a purulent discharge from the ear. In both instances all attempts to extract the foreign body had failed until the sprouting had caused the seed to split. Finally, there is recorded the case of a young man into whose nasal passage a leech had penetrated, while he was bathing, and had then taken up its abode far back in the canal. Donato, by aid of direct sunlight, “discovered the creature in that part where the nasal channel merges into the oral cavity.” Presumably he succeeded in removing the animal, but the text quoted by von Gurlt (Vol. II., p. 517) furnishes no further particulars.
CHAPTER XXXI
CHEMISTRY AND EXPERIMENTAL PHARMACOLOGY
The experiments which were carried out by Antonius Musa Brassavola, in the early part of the sixteenth century, upon animals and criminals, for the purpose of learning the effects produced by certain drugs when administered internally, afford one of the earliest instances of a genuine experimental pharmacology. The account of these experiments, which was published at Rome, in 1536, under the title “Examen omnium simplicium, quorum usus est in publicis officinis,” deserves honorable mention. An even more remarkable evidence of the research spirit which was abroad at that period is to be found in the work done by Fortunatus Fedelis, a native of Palermo, Sicily, and an ardent champion of the direct method of observation as applied to therapeutics.
Van Helmont, of whose life and contributions to the science of medicine I now propose to furnish a sketch, represents in a certain sense Paracelsus’ successor; and, as a matter of fact, he was even more closely associated with the development of chemistry as an independent science than was his predecessor.
Jean Baptiste Van Helmont was born at Brussels in 1577. His parents, who belonged to the nobility, possessed ample financial means and were therefore able to give their son every opportunity to secure a liberal education. While still a lad he enrolled himself among the students of the University of Louvain, and advanced so rapidly in his studies that, already at the early age of seventeen, he had passed all the examinations required of applicants for the degree of Master of Philosophy. He was not willing, however, to receive this honor at that time, feeling that he had not acquired sufficient knowledge to justify such acceptance; and from that date forward he turned his attention to the study of other branches of learning. Finally, in 1599, he accepted from the same university the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and soon afterward left Belgium with a large party of his friends to make an extensive tour through the Alps of Switzerland and Savoy. After his return home in 1602 he devoted his attention chiefly to chemical researches; but in a very short time he started off again on a journey to Spain and France, and eventually to England, where he spent nearly a year in the city of London, returning to Belgium in 1605. He married, about this time, a rich heiress of Wilworde, in the neighborhood of Brussels, and resumed with great zest his labors in chemistry and alchemy. He was thus enabled to manufacture many remarkable remedies with which—as he himself declared—he succeeded in curing myriads of patients who had failed to receive any benefit whatever from the ordinary resources of medical science. He died on December 30, 1644.
I do not feel equal to the task of expounding Van Helmont’s often very obscure theories regarding the physical and psychological processes that take place in the human being; regarding the distinctions which he makes between the “archaeus influus”—the regulating principle which governs all the psychical and physiological processes in the body—and the “archaeus insitus”—the subsidiary power which resides in each individual part of the body, but which at the same time is under the control of the “archaeus influus”; and regarding the doctrine that disease is the result of an “idea morbosa” of the “archaeus influus.” August Hirsch says that in developing these theories Van Helmont puts forward many bright ideas, which unfortunately lead one into a wilderness of fantastic, theosophic concepts. If sufficient time and space were at my command it might be interesting to separate some of these bright thoughts from the extravagances in which they are buried, and thus demonstrate the truth of the statements made by both Hirsch and Dezeimeris to the effect that Van Helmont, in matters relating to physiology and pathology, was unquestionably a precise and critical observer, a sound thinker, and a correct interpreter; but the plan of the present work will not permit me to enter into all these details. I can only quote a few of the teachings or sayings to which Hirsch refers:—
Digestion does not, as Galen maintains, depend upon heat, but upon a certain ferment existing in the gastric juice.
Heat is not, as has hitherto been taught, the cause of life, but rather one of its products.
The final cause of the sensory phenomena of life is the archaeus influus, which, while it is inseparably united with matter, nevertheless does not represent the soul itself, but rather the organ of the soul, and is seated in the “duumvirate” of the spleen and the stomach.
Disease, in order to acquire sufficient power to antagonize life effectively, must unite its forces with the archaeus influus.