The perversion of nature: Johannes Baptista Van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the magnetic cure of wounds

THE PERVERSION OF NATURE: JOHANNES BAPTISTA VAN HELMONT, THE SOCIETY OF JESUS, AND THE MAGNETIC CURE OF WOUNDS (1) In 1621, the Flemish physician Johannes Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) published a treatise on the magnetic cure of wounds, his De magnetica vulnerum curatione, that met with a widespread and negative reaction from academics throughout Europe. In the course of proceedings launched against him by ecclesiastical authorities in the Low Countries, Van Helmont claimed that his work had been published, without his permission, by the Jesuit priest Jean Roberti (1569-1651) after Van Helmont had sent a private copy of his work to Roberti's brother. It is this accusation of Jesuit interference made by Van Heimont on which I will focus here, as I attempt to place Van Helmont's work, and his subsequent accusation against the Jesuit order, within the context of the institutional and pedagogical goals of the Society of Jesus in the first decades of the seventeenth century. I will argue that the negative publicity garnered by Van Helmont's treatise provided a valuable opportunity for the Society in its ongoing struggle to assert and defend its place in early modern intellectual culture, an opportunity inspired in part by the overt incommensurability between Van Helmont's unique explanation for the magnetic cure of wounds and the more traditional, Scholastic natural philosophy promulgated by the Jesuit order. The Society's desire to publicly defend its firmly entrenched natural philosophical system from heterodox and potentially dangerous alternatives provides an explanatory model for both the wider Jesuit attacks against the phenomenon of the weapon salve, which was the contentious topic of Van Helmont's treatise, and Van Helmont's own accusation of Jesuit involvement in the illicit publication of his work. A recent historiographical foray into the realm of the weapon salve has attempted to unravel the complex philosophical debate to which Van Helmont himself was explicitly responding with his 1621 De magnetica vulnerum curatione. This debate, between the Marburg physician Rudolph Goclenius the Younger (1572-1621) and the Jesuit Jean Roberti, has been characterized by Carlos Ziller Camenietzki as fundamentally theological in scope and origin: "The debate over the weapon salve revolved around two opposing notions of Divine Providence which guided the respective arguments." (2) Though a preoccupation with religious issues did lie at the core of Jesuit discussions about nature, I wish to argue instead that the weapon salve was part of a larger debate concerned with changing conceptions of nature and the varying intellectual and institutional responses to those changes. This debate was made explicit in the respective projects of Rudolph Goclenius and Johannes Baptista van Helmont, as well as in the public and acrimonious responses to those projects by individuals like Jean Roberti. I As a topic of natural philosophical discussion, the weapon salve enjoyed an extensive history that ranged from the last decades of the sixteenth century through to the eighteenth. (3) Called variously the "armary unguent," "magnetic unguent," "powder of sympathy," and "powder of vitriol," it was reputed to heal wounds without being applied directly to them. (4) Though virtually every account of the weapon salve differed with respect to its composition and mechanism of action, all agreed that it was able to effect a clean and painless cure over considerable distances, usually when brought into contact with traces of blood from the wounded individual. Thus, a bloody weapon used to inflict an injury could be smeared with the salve which would then effect a cure. The phenomenon of healing over great distances not only captured the collective imagination of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--demonstrated both by extensive natural philosophical debates concerning its efficacy and by its incorporation into aspects of popular culture--but also went on to intrigue the modern world as well; the weapon salve was sometimes linked to animal mesmerism in the nineteenth century, and played the role of an ingenious if disturbing tool in the determination of longitude as described in a recent novel by Umberto Eco. …