Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
literary response to the emergence of modern chemistry. Whereas sci-
ence in general, including its various subject fields, heroes, and method-
ologies, was treated in the literature in all kinds of ways, this is not the
case with the representation of chemists. Chemistry is crucial in this
story for two reasons. On the one hand, chemistry was the prototype of
the experimental laboratory sciences that exploded in the nineteenth cen-
tury and induced an ongoing fragmentation and specialization of knowl-
edge, which posed a serious threat to any ideas of the unity of knowl-
edge. On the other hand, literary representations of chemists could easily
draw on the well-developed literary figure of the medieval 'alchemists',
which was already loaded with moral, social, metaphysical, and religious
criticism. Thus, in their critique of the emergence of modern science,
writers focused on chemists, whom they depicted in the fashion of the
medieval alchemist but equipped with some new attributes.
After some brief notes about the origin and characteristics of the me-
dieval alchemist in the early literature (Section 2), I discuss the literary
discourse about the emergence of modern science and chemistry in four
steps, which are layers of severity of criticism rather than historical
steps.
2
The third section deals with Christian Romanticism, which re-
newed the older discourse about the 'true alchemy' by arguing for relig-
ion and moral knowledge as opposed to natural philosophy or modern
science. In the fourth section, we meet approaches that reintroduced the
medieval alchemists in order to warn of the narrow-minded goals and
misleading promises, particularly of experimental chemistry. The con-
flict then turns into a battle fought out with metaphysical and theological
weapons in literary form. Taking chemistry as the embodiment of the
2
The texts that are mentioned in the following are taken from a sample of hundreds of
texts collected over the past five years with the additional aid of searching many vo-
luminous online collections of classical texts for occurrences of 'chemist' or equiva-
lents in other languages. With only few exceptions, all the texts from the nineteenth
century featuring a chemist fall into one or more of the four classes described below.
Because it is common practice in literary studies to read the (nonironic) employment
of mad scientists by authors as a form of criticism of science by these authors, I
follow that practice also in analyzing the historical roots of the mad scientists. Al-
though that may occasionally sound naive, I find the other option even more naive
with regard to pre-twentieth-century literature, according to which 'the work', and
not the author, speaks to the reader, particularly if hundreds of 'works' speak a simi-
lar language.
