Neder-over-Heembeek

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Neder-over-Heembeek, once a small village on the edge of medieval Brussels, is now a predominantly industrial zone, remarkable principally for the Military Hospital, which is the National Burns and Poisons center.

[edit] Jan van Helmont and alchemy

In 1618 or thereabouts, a most curious incident changed the course of scientific history here. In a farm near the church lived the local medic, one Jan van Helmont, a follower of the teachings of Paracelsus. His son Mercurius, a close friend, tutor and collaborator of Leibniz, records that one evening, a stranger knocked at the door and was admitted. The two men talked late into the night about alchemy, and on leaving, the stranger left van Helmont with some unusual powder: he immediately mixed it with eight ounces of mercury, sealed in a clay crucible which was heated over the fire for twenty minutes, and broke the pot - to find eight ounces of gold. There are some suggestions that this visitor may have been a researcher who had had a significant hand in events leading up to the execution of the Counts of Egmont and Hoorne for heresy in 1568. This opened van Helmont's eyes to the possibility of scientific process, and he went on to become one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry.

In 1843, the same farm became the residence of Count Gioacchino Pecci, the Papal Nuncio, who showed a more than passing interest in searching the place from top to bottom. Count Pecci became Pope Leo XIII in 1878.