How a 17th-century physician followed his ‘gut feeling’ and proposed a link between the emotions and the stomach, which seemingly echoes the lates

The soul in the stomach

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2024-11-10 21:00:08

How a 17th-century physician followed his ‘gut feeling’ and proposed a link between the emotions and the stomach, which seemingly echoes the latest medical research on the brain–gut connection.

S ometime in the first half of the 17th century, the alchemist and physician Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580–1644) was spending a fairly typical day in his laboratory conducting experiments on wolfsbane – a highly toxic flower sometimes called the ‘queen of poisons’ – when he was called away from his work to attend to some household business. Later that evening, he began to feel distinctly odd. “I felt,” he wrote, “that I did understand, conceive, savour, or imagine nothing in the head,” but rather, “that I understood and imagined in the midriffs.”

What van Helmont had experienced was, quite literally, a ‘gut feeling’, a powerful sense that his emotions, perceptions, and perhaps even his whole identity were somehow inextricably tied to his digestive tract. The experience set van Helmont on a path that would lead to a seemingly bizarre and radical theory. 

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