Alchemy Renaissance: Why many historians no longer see alchemy as an occult practice
by Phillip F. Schewe l Inside Science News Service
Alchemy is making a comeback.
Page from alchemic treatise of Ramon Llull
No, wizards have not learned how to transmute lead into gold and they
haven't found any rejuvenating elixir of life. But the scholars who
write the history of science and technology no longer lump alchemy in
with witchcraft as a pseudo-science.
Instead they see alchemy as the proper precursor to modern chemistry.
The modern word "alchemy" comes from the Arabic word "al kemia," which
incorporated a spectrum of knowledge of chemical properties and
practices from ancient times.
Chemist and historian Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University in
Maryland believes that the hardworking alchemists of the late Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, a period stretching across the 14th to the
17th centuries, were defamed by being lumped in with charlatans of the
19th century, quacks that were often depicted wearing eccentric costumes
and casting spells.
"We're in an alchemical revolution," said Principe during a meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February.
Principe said that just in the past 30 years articles about alchemy were
being accepted into Isis, one of the leading journals devoted to the
history of science. Before that a prohibition on alchemical subjects had
been in place.
The reason for this change is that historians are now recognizing the
huge role alchemists had in producing valuable things, even if the
alchemists never succeeded in turning lead into gold. By the way, making
new gold was of great concern to kings since it would have interfered
with the valuation of coins. This is why transmutation was considered a
crime and why alchemists often had to do their research in secret.
Alchemists did something more important than make new gold. They were
instrumental in the development of many technologies during pre-modern
times in Europe. For example, alchemists could be considered as an early
form of industrial researcher. William Newman of the University of
Indiana points out that alchemists "integrated a host of pursuits that
can be loosely labeled 'chemical technologies' with an experimental
practice that was linked to various theories about the nature and
operations of minerals and metals."
Newman provides plenty of examples. Alchemists, he says, were active in
assaying metals, refining salts, making dyes and pigments, making glass
and ceramics, artificial fertilizers, perfumes, and cosmetics. An
alchemists' shop was often the place in a town where you would go for
medicine. Even today in many parts of Europe you go to "the chemist,"
for medicine, rather than to a "drug store."
Principe said that alchemists perfected the process of distillation, in
which a mixed substance is boiled in such a way as to separate out one
component by letting a vapor collect in a portion of the apparatus where
it can be drawn off. Distillation is of course well known as the means
of making spirits like whiskey. But it was also used by alchemists to
make powerful acids, which in turn were important for a variety of
industrial purposes, such as for separating metals from their ores.
The career of Robert Boyle illustrates the new, more respectful, view of
alchemy. Boyle was long considered to be the first major modern
chemist, one whose quantitative and careful laboratory practice made him
the supposed antithesis of alchemy. But some 17th century documents,
fully interpreted by Principe for the first time, show that Boyle was an
avid alchemy practitioner.
So was the man often cited as the father of modern physics, Isaac Newton.
