Jan Baptist van Helmont

Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580 to 1644) was a chemist, physiologist and physician from Brussels, the youngest of five children of a public prosecutor and Brussels council member. He was educated at Leuven, travelled through Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany and England, took a medical degree in 1599 and his doctorate in medicine in 1609, and practised at Antwerp during the plague of 1605. His wife's inheritance let him retire early from medical practice and devote himself to chemical experiments at Vilvoorde. He worked in the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry and is sometimes considered the founder of pneumatic chemistry. He is remembered for his five year willow tree experiment, for introducing the word gas into the vocabulary of science and for his ideas on spontaneous generation, and he made the first proposal of a randomized controlled trial, in a work published after his death.