Helmont

[ hel-mont; Flemish hel-mawnt ]

noun

1. Jan Bap·tis·ta van [yahn bahp , tis, -tah-vahn], 1579–1644, Flemish chemist and physician.

Helmont

/ ˈhɛlmɔnt /

noun

1. HelmontJean Baptiste van15771644MFlemishSCIENCE: chemistMEDICINE: physician Jean Baptiste van (ʒɑ̃ batist vɑn). 1577–1644, Flemish chemist and physician. He was the first to distinguish gases and claimed to have coined the word gas

Example Sentences

Van Helmont, it is worth remarking, provoked the fury of the Jesuits, his co-religionists, by suggesting that the skull of a Jesuit would be ideal—he was hostile to the Jesuits because they had little difficulty persuading people to believe in their miracles, while his own scientific facts were met with scepticism.

From Literature

Van Helmont, Charleton and Digby argued that this was no bar to an effective cure; they wanted to redescribe the weapon salve as ‘magnetical’ because the magnet provides a paradigm case of action over a distance.

From Literature

The Sceptical Chymist and the Physiological Essays were works heavily influenced by van Helmont; it took a while for this new terminology to cross over from the topics discussed by the followers of Paracelsus, the iatro-chemists, into those discussed by the mathematicians.

From Literature

Hobbes was left out of the Royal Society—there is an extended literature on why—but Digby, Charleton and Boyle, all readers of van Helmont, were among the first members.

From Literature

Salusbury’s Mathematical Collections may thus have been crucial to the success of the word ‘fact’; they rescued it from Hobbes and van Helmont, from the weapon salve and the powder of sympathy, from furry babies and virgin births.

From Literature