Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
2.
The Chemical Portrait: Its Origin and Meaning
Whenever today's chemists want to be portrayed in such a way that any-
body can recognize their professional identity, they usually hold up in
their hand a flask filled with some liquid that they visually inspect.
1
This
posture has become the stereotypical visual icon of chemistry in self-
portraits, professional photographs, and clip-art cartoons (Figure 1a/b).
Some chemists might feel uncomfortable with this pose because it does
not accurately embody their daily professional work. They might wonder
about the visual conventions that forces them to assume this strange pose
or about the historical origin and implications. In this section we investi-
gate the historical origin and development of this motif. We argue that
before chemists assumed it as their professional icon, the motif, original-
ly representing uroscopy, was first an icon of medicine and then became
a symbol of quackery and imposture.
2.1 Uroscopy becomes an emblem of medicine
Along with pulse feeling,
2
uroscopy (the examination of the patients'
urine) was the major means of medical diagnosis in late ancient, medie-
val, and early modern medicine. Color, smell, taste, and precipitate in
fresh urine were supposed to reveal to the learned physician the specific
disease and temperament of his patient. Briefly mentioned in the Hippo-
cratic Corpus and extensively dealt with by Galen, the doctrine of uros-
copy later became part of the medical core curricula of the newly estab-
lished Christian universities in Western Europe. This shift of uroscopy
into the core curricula of Christian universities was facilitated by the
translation of Islamic medical texts from Arabic into Latin and the estab-
lishment of the school of Salerno, the first medical school in Europe.
Before this time medicine had been considered a mechanical art or
craft, such as carpentry and forging, and excluded from Church school
1
Although chemists are photographed and sketched in some other poses, that pose is
by far the most dominating public image of chemistry on the Internet and in cliparts
according to our previous work (Schummer & Spector 2007).
2
Pulse feeling was not the same as pulse taking in today's meaning, as long as trans-
portable clocks were unavailable. Instead it consisted of feeling the pressure and
rhythm of the pulse.
