In "Inventing Chemistry", historian John C. Powers turns his attention to Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738), a Dutch medical and chemical professor whose work reached a wide, educated audience and became the template for chemical knowledge in the eighteenth century. The primary focus of this study is Boerhaave's educational philosophy, and Powers traces its development from Boerhaave's early days as a student in Leiden through his publication of the "Elementa chemiae" in 1732. Powers reveals how Boerhaave restructured and reinterpreted various practices from diverse chemical traditions – including craft chemistry, Paracelsian medical chemistry, and alchemy – shaping them into a chemical course that conformed to the pedagogical and philosophical norms of Leiden's medical faculty. In doing so, Boerhaave gave his chemistry a coherent organizational structure and philosophical foundation and thus transformed an artisanal practice into an academic discipline".Inventing Chemistry" will be essential reading for historians of chemistry, medicine, and academic life.
About the Author
John C. Powers is collateral assistant professor in the Department of History and assistant director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Reviews
"In this extensive and meticulously researched study, John C. Powers brings Herman Boerhaave – a central player in the deployment of the 'new science' in European higher education – to life, revealing him as a self-aware scholar who engaged both his predecessors and contemporaries as he constructed what would become his most important book, 'Elements of Chemistry'. Indeed, readers see the Boerhaave of the Enlightenment, who deployed experimental natural philosophy in a way that would characterize the 'chemical revolution' of Antoine Lavoisier years before the traditional frame of that revolution. 'Inventing Chemistry' will help historians evaluate the seeming rupture that came with the changing lexicon of chemistry during the second half of the century and return attention to the intellectual processes and experimental realities that underlay the celebrated changes in chemical narrative, which, while justifiably taken to be markers of these changes, were not their historical substance" – Jole Shackelford, University of Minnesota
"Herman Boerhaave was famous in the eighteenth century as the man who taught Europe chemistry, though he has been little studied since. John C. Powers has finally given him his due. In a work of meticulous and imaginative scholarship, he has shown how Boerhaave built his reputation by organizing chemistry for the purpose of pedagogy. In Boerhaave's classroom, as Powers shows, chemistry shrugged off its alchemical heritage and emerged as a science of the Enlightenment" – Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire
"It used to be said that 'those who can, do; those who can't, teach'. In this exceptionally lucid study of Herman Boerhaave, John C. Powers shows how completely wrong this adage is, for, through his pedagogy, Boerhaave invented a new 'philosophical' chemistry, reshaping the conceptual foundations of chemistry and giving it both a theoretical framework and a central role in the medical curriculum. Powers critiques and expands the most recent scholarship in the history of chemistry and employs entirely unstudied archival sources to produce a groundbreaking reconsideration of the history of chemistry and to point the way to a very fruitful direction for the history of science more generally. With exemplary clarity and elegance, Powers demonstrates that, for Boerhaave, pedagogy was an active, constructive endeavor, oriented to research and generative of new knowledge that reconfigured the fields of medicine and chemistry. Boerhaave was the architect of a new chemistry, and Powers restores him to his rightful place in the history of the discipline" – Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University
