Jan Baptist van Helmont

Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist and physician from Brussels who worked in the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, the effort to explain the body and its diseases through chemical processes. He is sometimes called the founder of pneumatic chemistry. Van Helmont is remembered chiefly for his five year willow tree experiment, for bringing the word gas into scientific vocabulary from the Greek word chaos, and for his views on spontaneous generation. Born in 1580, he died in 1644, and his writings were influential among later seventeenth century physicians and chemists.