Review: Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution

Moran, Bruce T. Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

The work is, by its nature, an introductory work, aimed more for students or general readers wishing to get a crash course in European alchemy during the Scientific Revolution, but also interestingly, Moran’s chronology reaches into the in the Middle Ages, because of course, alchemy did not spring, fully formed and articulated, in the early modern period.  Despite its brevity, it must be noted that it fulfills its aims quite well.  It is a short, compact, but adept little book that discusses the conceptual framework and development of alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.  While its format is that of the standard textbook in history of science, its argument takes into account several interesting features that have been coming out of the scholarship in the Scientific Revolution over the past decade or so.  Eschewing the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution (in which alchemy is vilified as the exemplar of the irrationality of premodern knowledge), and even a more nuanced argument that alchemy is important because certain alchemical principles would become important for later chemists, he instead argues for the centrality of alchemical practice in a new sort of Scientific Revolution, one that was not a revolution of ideas, but a revolution in the way artisanal practices were viewed.  In this, Moran’s work is very similar to a recent work by Pamela Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, which also argues that if we begin to look at physical processes, practical experiences, and the physical process of doing, then we see the story of the Scientific Revolution in a new light. 

The book begins with a description of the many things that doing alchemy *meant* in the early modern period, and the second chapter stresses the links that alchemical practices had to the various artisanal practices of the day.  The third chapter treats Paracelsus, the iconoclast physician without whom no treatment of alchemy is complete.  The fourth chapter looks at the places where alchemical and chemical learning was done.  The Paracelsians had long laid claim to the courts of German princes, and Philip II had also created an alchemical laboratory in his own court, and was a great patron of Paracelsian doctors and apothecaries. Attempts were also made, Moran writes, to secure a place for chemical knowledge within academic walls, and the tradition of teaching it at the university began in early seventeenth century Paris, and spread to other sites of early modern knowledge-making like the Jardin des Plantes.  Chapter 5 brings us into the world of apparatuses and experiences beyond the ken of those who worked only in the environments that nature provided.  Hooke and Boyle’s air pump, for example, gave new sites of knowledge-making, including alchemical knowledge.  The chapter also goes on to talk about Boyle’s major work, the Scepitcal Chemist, and the views on alchemy and chemistry it contained.  His main aim in the book, Moran writes, was to attack the claims of those who, without experimental justification assumed the presence of principles and elements to use in their chemical philosophies, taking direct aim, or course, at Aristotle’s four elements, and Paracelsus’ three principles of mercury, salt, and sulfur.  What Boyle replaced these elements and principles with was buts of matter in motion, obeying the laws of god and nature.  Boyle, like Bacon and Starkey, displayed a skeptical empiricism, and a desire to make knowledge through experiment, a newly forming category of the time.  The discussion of alchemy as a discipline that crossed traditional boundaries is the subject of the final chapter. Alchemy, he argues, crossed national borders, and was at home in the courts as well as in the academies.  Alchemists worked to support the mechanical view of life, while other alchemists balanced these discussions with arguments for the presence of vitalistic principles. He uses that to stress his view of the Scientific Revolution not as a story of opposites, with one aspect of a pair triumphing over another, but to look at the congruences between them, be they between mechanism and vitalism, or alchemy and mechanics. In this way, he argues, we can see how the process of making things can share a role in the process of creating scientific knowledge. To this end, he discuses the contribution of chemistry and mechanics to medicine, and (following in the footsteps of Betty Jo Dobbs’ The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) Newton’s alchemical practices, which Newton took very seriously.

Moran concludes with the usual story of reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution:  alchemy and chemistry. were important, even before they were quantitative; modern categories of ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ have little bearing in the early modern world, and there was more of a continuity than a displacement in the move from alchemy to chemistry during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  His overall point, reiterated in the conclusion, is that hands-on practices themselves were forms of making knowledge, and that these activities should be afforded a place, alongside discoveries and theories, in the now-traditional narrative of the so-called Scientific Revolution.