Elements, Principles and the Narrative of Affinity

In the eighteenth century, the concept of ‘affinity’, ‘principle’ and ‘element’ dominated chemical discourse, both inside and outside of the laboratory. Although much work has been done on these terms and the methodological commitments which guided their usage, most studies over the past two centuries have concentrated on their application as relevant to Lavoisier’s oxygen theory and the new nomenclature. Kim’s Affinity challenges this historiographical trajectory by looking at several French chemists in light of their private thoughts, public disputations and communal networks. In doing so, she tells a complex story which points to the methodological and practical importance of industrial and medical chemistry. The following review highlights the advantages and snares of such an approach and makes a few historiographical points along the way. 1. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW For many of today’s historians of science, reading a book about early modern chemistry would most probably induce a heinous case of intellectual dyspepsia. Perhaps this can be attributed to the gastronomic overtones of funny sounding words like ‘butter of arsenic’, ‘milk of lime’ and ‘tartar of wine’. Or, perhaps ‘Plessy’s green’ and ‘Plimmer’s Salt’ make for a bad side salad in classes where the main course is really Newton, Darwin or social discourse. These esoteric names serve to make the subject unpalatable to scholars unversed in the seemingly anarchical and archaic vocabulary of ‘chymistry’ as it existed in the centuries between the scientific and chemical revolutions. One way many historians have reacted to this situation is by framing their work in relation to its relevance to concepts which are at least familiar to the modern reader. Since the nineteenth century, this approach has produced a number of elegantly written books in which the time between the careers of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier is retrospectively filtered through the so called ‘Chemical Revolution’. Though helpful in translating the work of Enlightenment ‘chymistry’ into the language of modern science, these studies ignore the vast experimental culture of chemistry as practiced in medicine, industry and provincial societies. Thus, when an intrepid researcher seeks to step outside the chemical revolution historiography, there are relatively few sources available which offer guidance on how to untangle the research programs, nomenclature and ontologies which guided pre-Lavoisierian chemistry. Nevertheless, over the past few decades a rising number of studies have addressed the laboratory practices and epistemological commitments of early modern chemists. Building on the studies of Hélène Metzger, Reijer Hooykaas and Maurice Crosland, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the work of Frederic Lawrence Holmes, Allen Debus, Arthur L. Donovan, Karl Hufbauer, Norma E. Emerton and David R. Oldroyd. Holmes continued to write on the subject throughout his career, producing two of the most helpful texts on early modern France: Eighteenth-Century as an Investigative Enterprise (1991) and Antoine-Lavoisier—The Next Crucial Year (1999). The foundation laid by these authors has paved the way for more nuanced studies which have investigated issues more relevant to the actual practice of early modern chemistry. A role call of these studies would include: Marco Beretta’s excavation of the history of chemical classification and nomenclature; Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jan Golinski’s work on chemical communities; William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe’s explication of the influential role played by alchemical methods and imagery in the Scientific Revolution; and, finally, Andreas-Holger Maehle and Brian Nance’s emphasis on the central role played by therapeutics and experimental pharmacology. Key to many of these studies, especially those that focus on the eighteenth century, is the concept of chemical affinity. In particular, Alistair Duncan’s work addressed the subject from a pan-European perspective and Ursula Klein focused in on Etienne-François Geoffroy’s affinity table and workshop traditions. Mi Gyung Kim’s Affinity that Illusive Dream follows in the wake of these studies. Like the work of Maehle, Donovan and Bensaude-Vincent – as well as other eighteenthcentury intellectual historians like Anders Lundgren, Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich – Kim concentrates on a specific linguistic and national context. Instead of analytically presenting an argument, she gives a Foulcaultian narrative with characters drawn 1 Hélène Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France: du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923) and Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la doctrine chimique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930). Reijer Hooykaas, ‘The concepts of “individual” and “species” in chemistry’, Centaurus, 5 (1958), 307-322; ‘The discrimination between “natural” and “artificial” substances and the development of corpuscular theory’, Archives internationales d’histoire de sciences, 4 (1948), 640-651. Maurice P. Crosland Historical studies in the language of chemistry (London: Heinemann, 1962). 2 Frederic L. Holmes, ‘Analysis by fire and solvent extractions: The metamorphosis of a tradition’, Isis, 62 (1971), 129-148. Allen Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vols. I & II (New York: Science History Publications, 1977). Arthur L. Donovan, Philosophical chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment : the doctrines and discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1975). Karl Hufbauer, The formation of the German chemical community 1720-1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Norma E. Emerton, The scientific reinterpretation of form (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). David R. Oldroyd’s articles from this time are now collected in Sciences of the earth : studies in the history of mineralogy and geology (Aldershot : Ashgate, 1998). 3 Marco Beretta, The Enlightenment of Matter: The definition of chemistry from Agricola to Lavoisier (Canton: Science History Publications, 1993). 4 Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Ferdinando Abbri (eds). Lavoisier in European context: Negotiating a new language for chemistry (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1995). Jan Golinski, Science as public culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992). 5 William R. Newman, Gehennical fire: the lives of George Starkey, an American alchemist in the scientific revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy tried in the fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the fate of Helmontian chemistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Lawrence M. Principe, The aspiring adept: Robert Boyle and his alchemical quest (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1998). 6 Andreas-Holger Maehle, Drugs on trial: experimental pharmacology and therapeutic innovation in the eighteenth century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). Brian Nance, Turquet de Mayerne as baroque physician: the art of medical portraiture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 7 Alistair Duncan, Laws and order in eighteenth-century chemistry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Ursula Klein, Verbindung und Affinität: die Grundlegung der neuzeitlichen Chemie an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994), ‘E.F. Geoffroy's table of different 'rapports' observed between different chemical substances: a reinterpretation’, Ambix 42 (1995), 79-100’; ‘The chemical workshop tradition and the experimental practice: Discontinuities within continuities", Science in Context 9 (1996), 251-287. Klein has also just recently investigated the crucial link between material culture and pharmacological experimentation in ‘Experimental History and Herman Boerhaave’s chemistry of plants’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 34 (2003), 533-567. 8 Anders Lundgren, The new chemistry in Sweden: the debate that wasn't, Osiris, 4 (1988), 146-168; Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, The enlightenment in national context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).