In 1784, a connoisseur of intellectual life in Berlin reported to Lorenz Crell, professor of theoretical medicine and materia medica at the University of Helmstedt and editor of the Chemische Annalen, that interest in chemistry had grown enormously in his city: “You will hardly believe how much the study of chemistry is appreciated here now,” he exclaimed. “Lectures on chemistry are attended by people from all social classes (Stände); what’s more, since this winter there are also distinguished members of the fairer sex in the audience.” These ladies, he continued, “forsake their coffee and game tables, their assemblies and picnics, to staunchly endure cold and heat, fumes and charcoal dust, and all other discomforts of a chemical workshop.” Crell was ready to believe this observation. Since 1783, Martin Heinrich Klaproth’s public lectures on chemistry had indeed attracted a large audience in Berlin, among them many ladies. Furthermore, the impressive number of 424 subscribers to his own journal in the very same year was not least a manifestation of chemistry’s success in Germany. In 1778, when Crell set out to publish the first issue of his chemical periodical, he emphasized that “chemistry’s extended influence on learning and its great utility for the commonweal are so generally recognized that they need no proof.” In Crell’s view, Germany was other nations’ “acknowledged teacher” of chemistry. “Nature itself,” he proclaimed, “seems to have destined us to become chemists; and, as we fulfill this calling, there is perhaps no other country where there are so many chemists (Scheidekünstler), be they true or false, as in Germany.”
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References
Notes
Unless noted, all translations are my own. The anonymous letter entitled “Vom Herrn M. H. in Berlin,” was published in the Chemische Annalen für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufakturen, pt. 1, 1784, 342. None of the subscribers to the Chemische Annalen who lived in Berlin at the time had the initials M. H., see Karl Hufbauer, The Formation of the German Chemical Community (1720–1795) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 293 and 278–80.
See Georg Edmund Dann, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, 1743–1817 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 65f.
Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 85.
Lorenz Crell, “Vorrede,” Chemisches Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufacturen, pt. 1, 1778, 9–20, on 9; translated in Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 70.
Crell, Chemisches Journal, pt. 1, 1778, 9–20, on 10. Hufbauer quoted additional claims by eighteenth-century German chemists to leadership among European chemists (Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 83). Although German chemists’ self-assessment is rhetorical, it should be noted that the strong focus of historians of chemistry on French chemistry in the eighteenth century is somewhat unbalanced from a historical point of view. In the late eighteenth century, France and Germany, as well as Sweden, were regarded as countries where chemistry flourished. For example, in 1791 the translators of Crell’s Chemische Annalen into English mused about the “cause of the great(er) progress of chemistry in France, Germany and Sweden”; see Crell’s Chemical Journal 1, 1791, 106; Chemische Annalen, pt. 2, 1778, 188–91, on 188.
Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 54. Between 1720 and 1780 Hufbauer counted 42 renowned chemists. He estimated that this number represented a fifth or sixth of all Germans carrying out chemical investigation. For his criteria of selection of well-known chemists, see Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 50. On chemists and apothecaries in late eighteenth-century Germany, see also Bernard Gustin, The Emergence of the German Chemical Profession 1790–1867 (PhD thesis: The University of Chicago, 1975); Ernst Homburg, “Two Factions, One Profession: The Chemical Profession in German Society 1780–1870,” 39–76 in The Making of the Chemist: The Social History of Chemistry in Europe 1789–1914, David Knight and Helge Kragh, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 54–55.
Several of these chemists would later obtain positions as mining and metallurgical officials. For additional arts and crafts in Germany that implemented chemical techniques and knowledge, see Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 57–61; Ursula Klein, “Technoscience avant la lettre,” Perspectives on Science 13, 2005, 227–66.
In France, a professional school was established in 1777, the Collège de Pharmacie de Paris, and apothecaries were officially designated pharmacien from that time. See Edward Kremers and Georg Urdang, History of Pharmacy: A Guide and a Survey (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940); Jonathan Simon, Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777–1809 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Sacha Tomic, Les Pratiques et les Enjeux de l’Analyse Chimique des Végétaux: Étude d’une Culture Hybride (1790–1835) (PhD diss., Université de Paris X–Nanterre, 2003).
See Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 86–88. Information about subscribers for the period 1784–89 is given in Crell’s journal.
The most active contributor (68 papers) was the apothecary and chemist Johann Friedrich Westrumb (1751–1819), who first administered the Hofapotheke in Hanover and was then lessee of the Ratsapotheke in Hameln until his death in 1819. Westrumb performed all the experiments he reported in his publications in his pharmaceutical laboratory. In addition he was mining commissioner, member of the Chamber of Commerce of Hannover, and a chemical entrepreneur who attempted to establish commerical bleaching with chlorine from 1789 to 1790. Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 205.
Relying strongly on the rhetoric of the Lavoisier group, Simon’s “Chemistry,” argues that the Chemical Revolution engendered a bifurcation of pharmacy and chemistry; Tomic, Les Pratiques questions this view.
Among the areas of production that intersected with chemistry, the most important were pharmacy and metallurgy, especially assaying. The terms “technology” (Technologie, which means systematic knowledge about technical devices and the arts and crafts, or industry) and “chemical technology” were used by German chemists from ca. 1770 onward.
It should be noted that my focus on the apothecary-chemists does not entail the assertion that these men were more important than other prominent eighteenth-century German chemists who were educated mainly at universities and predominantly professors teaching at universities, such as Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742), Johann Eller (1689–1760), Johann Heinrich Pott (1692–1777), Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1748–1804), and Christian Ehrenfried Weigel (1748–1831). Furthermore my focus in this paper on people and social institutions implies that I will not study in detail other interesting features of the interconnectedness of chemistry and pharmacy in eighteenth-century Germany, such as the overlapping material culture and the correspondence between techniques of producing chemical remedies and techniques of chemical analysis. It further implies that I will not examine in detail the questions of what different forms of knowledge existed in eighteenth-century chemistry and which parts of it played a role in the pharmaceutical handicraft, and which were irrelevant. These additional aspects will be studied in two forthcoming papers: Ursula Klein, “Apothecary’s Shops, Laboratories and Manufacture in Eighteenth-Century Germany” 246–276 in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear, eds. (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, forthcoming) and “Blending Technical Innovation and Learned Natural Knowledge: The Making of Ethers” in Between the Marketplace and the Laboratory: Materials and Expertise (1500–1800), Ursula Klein and Emma Spary, eds., forthcoming.
For the stock of remedies that existed in Germany before the Paracelsian movement, see Dietrich Arends, Erika Hickel, and Wolfgang Schneider, Das Warenlager einer mittelalterlichen Apotheke (Ratsapotheke Lüneburg 1475) (Braunschweig: Technische Hochschule, 1960); Astrid Müller-Grzenda, Pflanzenwässer und gebrannter Wein als Arzeneimittel zu Beginn der Neuzeit: Herstellungsverfahren, Hersteller und Handel, Beschaffenheit und Bedeutung für die Materia Medica (Stuttgart: Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, 1996); Erika Hickel, Salze in den Apotheken des 16. Jahrhunderts (Braunschweig: Technische Hochschule, 1965); R. J. Forbes, Short History of the Art of Distillation, from the Beginnings up to the Death of Cellier Blumenthal (Leiden: Brill, 1948); Hermann Schelenz, Zur Geschichte der pharmazeutisch-chemischen Destilliergeräte (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964).
“Pharmacopoeias” (or “dispensatories”) were apothecary books with governmental authority; in Germany, their authors were physicians until the late eighteenth century, when apothecaries also became authors of pharmacopoeias. Arzeneitaxen were lists of fixed prices for medicines set by the government.
The Prussian medical edict of 1693 is reprinted in Manfred Stürzbecher, Beiträge zur Berliner Medizingeschichte: Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des Gesundheitswesens vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966), 43–64, see 49; on the term “laboratory” see 51 and 54. The term “laborant” meant distillers, many of whom came from Thüringen. The 1685 Brandenburg medical edict (also reprinted in Stürzbecher, Beiträge, 27–34) explicitly excluded alchemists from the preparation of chemical remedies, except those for which they had obtained privileges (see 31). For a similar order in the 1721 medical edict of the Duchy Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel see Gabriele Beisswanger, Arzeneimittelversorgung im 18. Jahrhundert: Die Stadt Braunschweig und die ländlichen Distrikte im Herzogtum Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig: Braunschweiger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Pharmazie und der Naturwissenschaften, 1996).
See Erika Hickel, “Der Apothekerberuf als Keimzelle naturwissenschaftlicher Berufe in Deutschland,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 13, 1978: 259–76; Erika Hickel, Apotheken, Arzeneimittel und Naturwissenschaften in Braunschweig, 1677–1977 (Braunschweig: Hagenmarkt-Apotheke, 1977); Erika Hickel, Arzeneimittel-Standardisierung im 19. Jahrhundert in den Pharmakopöen Deutschlands, Frankreichs, Großbritanniens und der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1973); Wolfgang Schneider, Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Chemie (Weinheim: Verlag Chemie GmbH, 1972) and Lexikon zur Arzeneimittelgeschichte: Sachwörterbuch zur Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Botanik, Chemie, Mineralogie, Pharmakologie, Zoologie, 7 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Govi-Verlag, 1968–74); Mechthild Krüger, Zur Geschichte der Elixiere, Essenzen und Tinkturen (Braunschweig: Technische Hochschule, 1968); Beisswanger, Arzeneimittelversorgung.
For general outlines of the pharmaceutical apprenticeship in eighteenth-century Germany see Kremers and Urdang, History, 120–22; Alfred Adlung and Georg Urdang, Grundriß der Geschichte der Deutschen Pharmazie (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1935), 133–34; Berthold Beyerlein, Die Entwicklung der Pharmazie zur Hochschuldisziplin (1750–1875), ein Beitrag zur Universitäts- und Sozialgeschichte (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991).
The officine was the public room of an apothecary’s shop, where the apothecary dispensed Galenic remedies and sold all kinds of remedies; see also Figure 3, which shows the many rooms belonging to an early modern apothecary’s shop.
Stürzbecher, Beiträge, p. 54.
Ibid.
Ibid., 52. Purgantia were Galenic medicines for “purification.”
I will come back to this point below.
The school was founded in 1724 primarily for the education and training of surgeons, especially military surgeons. See Herbert Lehmann, Das Collegium medico-chirurgicum in Berlin als Lehrstätte der Botanik und der Pharmazie (Berlin: Triltsch & Huther, 1936).
The relevant passage of the medical edict is published in ibid., 14.
At the same time, the collegium medicum in Berlin was reorganized as Ober-collegium-medicum, which was at the top of the hierarchy in the medical system and controlled the collegia medica in the provinces.
Lehmann, Collegium, 10, 18. The buildings of the Berlin Society of Sciences belonged to a complex of buildings, which also included the Royal Marstall, located between Unter den Linden and Dorotheenstraße.
See Caspar Neumann, Chymia medica dogmatico-experimentalis (Züllichau, 1756).
See Alexander von Lyncker, “Die Matrikel des preußischen Collegium medico-chirurgicum in Berlin 1730 bis 1768,” Archiv für Sippenforschung 11 (Heft 5), 1934, 129–57.
See Lehmann, Collegium, 16; Hickel, “Apothekerberuf”; Adlung and Urdang, Grundriß, 134.
Wiegleb’s autobiographical notes were integrated into a necrology by his friend, the physician Dr. Stoeller; see Stoeller, “Nekrolog Johann Christian Wiegleb,” Allgemeines Journal der Chemie 4, 1800, 684–720. On Wiegleb see also Fritz Krafft, “Johann Christian Wiegleb und seine Rolle bei der Verwissenschaftlichung der Chemie,” 151–95 in Apotheker und Universität: die Vorträge der Pharmaziehistorichen Biennale in Leipzig vom 12. bis 14. Mai 2000, Christoph Friedrich and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, eds. (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002).
Stoeller, “Nekrolog,” 689.
Ibid.
In addition he bought Gottfried Rothe’s Gründliche Einleitung zur Chemie (1717); Johann Kunckel’s posthumously published Laboratorium Chymicum (1716); Christoph Heinrich Keil’s Compendiöses, Doch vollkommenes Medicinisch-Chymisches Handbüchlein (1734); and the metallurgical and chemical writings of Georg Ernst Stahl (ibid., 690).
In 1782, Wiegleb also published a new, abridged translation of Herman Boerhaave’s Elementa chemiae (1732), which concentrated on the practical part of the book.
Stoeller, “Nekrolog,” 691.
Kremers and Urdang quote Goethe to highlight the high social esteem of German apothecaries around 1800. In 1822 Goethe stated that “in Germany the apothecary enjoys a highly esteemed position within society … The German apothecaries cultivate science. They are aware of its importance and endeavor to utilize it in practical pharmacy”; Kremers and Urdang, History, 123.
Stoeller, “Nekrolog,” 693.
Ibid., 696.
Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 191.
Stoeller, “Nekrolog,” 696.
For boarding schools see also below.
“Auch ein kleiner Beytrag über den Zustand der Pharmacie in Deutschland,” Almanach oder Taschenbuch für Scheidekünstler und Apotheker 1793, 49–72; Göttling’s comment is 72–75.
Anonymous, “Kleiner Beytrag,” 57–63.
See Dann, Klaproth, 19–20; Grünhagen, “Einrichtung Apotheken”; Hermann Lorenz, Die Ratsapotheke zu Quedlinburg (transcript of the Quedlinburger Kreisblatt, Nr. 178–81, 1928, courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek Freie Universität Berlin). In addition to the rooms mentioned above, there were large rooms and smaller rooms on the first floor for guests to town and for the journeyman, and private rooms for the apothecary on the ground floor. The apprentices had to sleep in a large closet next to the laboratory.
For the chemical remedies that were newly introduced in Germany in the period 1670–1750, see Schneider, Lexikon, 3: 75–127 and Geschichte, 148–52.
A document from 1754 mentions, in particular, six furnaces for distilling, two furnaces for the manufacture of spirits, a chimney with a mantle, and instruments for cupellation. See Konrad Grünhagen, Über den Bau und die Einrichtung von Apotheken in alter und neuer Zeit (Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch, 1939), 79.
In the 1780s the Ratsapotheke of Quedlinburg was run by an apothecary named Schacht who was also a subscriber to Crell’s Chemische Annalen (see Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 287).
Quoted in Dann, Klaproth, 15.
Dann, Klaproth, 15 and 142. His grandfather, father, and uncle were physicians; his father wrote an alchemical text on tincture of gold.
Johann Christian Lüderitz Liphardt, “Bemerkungen, Wünsche und Vorschläge für sämtliche Herren der Apothekerkunst; als ein Nachtrag zur moralischen Disziplin des Herrn Bindheim,” Almanach 1784, 70–98, on 73. Liphardt’s article was a response to an article by the Berlin apothecary Johann Jacob Bindheim, published in the previous issue of the Almanach of 1783. In this article Bindheim had argued for the traditional moral virtues of an apprentice, which also had been required in the Prussian medical edict (see above). Bindheim demanded above all that the pharmaceutical apprentice be obedient, hardworking, and neat; apart from some knowledge of Latin, good orthography, and the readiness to read books, he did not stress the need for a more learned education, as Liphardt did. See Johann Jacob Bindheim, “Sendschreiben, über die moralische Disciplin des Apothekers,” Almanach 1783, 81–93. On Bindheim and Liphardt see also Wolfgang-Hagen Hein and Holm-Dietmar Schwarz, Deutsche Apotheker-Biographie, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1975–97).
Liphardt, “Bemerkungen,” 73.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 89–90.
Ibid., 86.
Ibid., 91.
On the different eighteenth-century social groups occupied with the production of remedies – mostly small, specific groups of them such as distilled aromatic oils, alcoholic spirits, and syrups – see also Beisswanger, Arzeneimittelversorgung; Ulla Meinecke, Apothekenbindung und Freiverkäuflichkeit von Arzeneimitteln: Darstellung der historischen Entwicklung bis zur Kaiserlichen Verordnung von 1901 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Kurfürstentums Brandenburg und des Königreichs Preußen (PhD diss.: University of Marburg, 1971).
This also becomes manifest in the textbooks published by apothecary-chemists, which covered the entire range of practical or “applied chemistry” and chemical theory.
Martius was a subscriber to Crell’s Chemische Annalen (see Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 283), but he was a marginal figure in the German chemical community (ibid., 107); apart from his autobiography, he published four smaller works, three of which dealt with pharmaceutical botany and one with mineralogical observations; Hein and Schwarz, Deutsche Apotheker Biographie, 2: 409–10.
Ernst Wilhelm Martius, Erinnerungen aus meinem neunzigjährigen Leben (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1847), 17–19.
Göttling published an extract of the letter as “Auszug eines Schreibens über pharmaceutische Lehrmethode,” Almanach 1787, 62–77.
See Karl Gottfried Hagen, Lehrbuch der Apothekerkunst (Königsberg, 1786), 5–6.
Hagen, Lehrbuch, 49.
Ibid., 51–52.
“Lehrmethode,” 67–71.
Ibid., 73.
See Bindheim, “Sendschreiben”; Liphardt, “Bemerkungen”; “Lehrmethode”; “Ueber den Zustand der Pharmacie in Wien. An meine Mitbrüder in Niedersachsen und den Reichslanden,” Almanach 1792, 49–108; in reply to the former: “Auch ein kleiner Beytrag über den Zustand der Pharmacie in Deutschland,” Almanach 1793, 49–74; Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff, “Der vollkommene Apotheker,” Almanach 1793, 75–96 and “Methode, junge Leute zu brauchbaren Apothekern zu erziehen,” Journal der Pharmacie für Ärzte und Apotheker 1, pt. 1, 1793, 29–39; “Ueber Hrn. Apotheker Merkels in Nürnberg Vorschläge, sich künftig brauchbarere Apotheker-Subjekte zu verschaffen. Von einem der Pharmacie Beflissenen,” Almanach 1793, 119–32; J. R. Spielmann, “Ueber pharmaceutische Schulanstalten,” Journal der Pharmacie für Aerzte und Apotheker 1, pt. 1, 1793, 48–58.
“Apotheker-Subjekte,” 112 and 122; “Kleiner Beytrag.”
Trommsdorff, “Apotheker,” 80–81.
Trommsdorff, “Plan und Zweck dieser Zeitschrift,” Journal der Pharmacie für Aerzte und Apotheker 1, pt. 1, 1793, I–XII, II.
Trommsdorff, “Methode.”
The boarding school, which addressed not only prospective apothecaries, and its curriculum were announced in Trommsdorff’s journal; see Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff, “Nachricht von einer chemisch-physikalischen, und pharmaceutischen Pensionsanstalt, für Jünglinge,” Journal der Pharmacie für Aerzte und Apotheker 2 (1795), part 1 (1794). As Hufbauer pointed out, this successful school was open until 1828, and taught more than 300 students, of which at least 13 subsequently established chemical factories. In 1823, the Prussian government announced that attending this school was equivalent to university attendance; see Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 218ff.
Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädt, “Nachricht von einer chemischen Pensionsanstalt für Jünglinge, die sich zu praktischen Chemikern bilden wollen,” Chemische Annalen, pt. 1, 1790, 94–96, on 94. On chemical and pharmaceutical boarding schools in eighteenth-century Germany see also Dieter Pohl, Zur Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Privatinstitute in Deutschland von 1779–1873 (PhD diss., University of Marburg, 1972); Gustin, “German Chemical Profession,” 60–77.
Hermbstädt, “Nachricht,” 96.
See, for example, S. R. Epstein, “Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe,” Journal of Economic History 58, 1998, 684–713; Reinhold Reith, “Technische Innovationen im Handwerk der Frühen Neuzeit,” 21–60 in Stadt und Handwerk in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Karl Heinrich Kaufbold and Wilfried Reininghaus, eds. (Köln: Böhlau, 2000).
See Stoeller, “Nekrolog,” 698.
Martius, Erinnerungen, 38.
Martius remarked that journeymen and clerks of apothecaries were treated “like commodities” at the time, “for when they needed a position they addressed a grocery (Materialhandlung), and the master apothecary (Principal) did the same when he wanted to fill the position of a clerk. The apothecary who bought most from the Materialist got the best clerk.” (Martius, Erinnerungen, 51–52).
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid., 69.
Johann Friedrich A. Göttling, “Einige Bemerkungen über Chemie und Pharmazie in England,” Almanach 1789, 120–44.
See also Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 208.
Göttling, “England,” 124.
Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 128–44.
Ibid., 122.
On the school, see above. On Neumann’s professional career see Alfred Exner, Der Hofapotheker Caspar Neumann (1683–1737) (Berlin: Triltsch & Huther, 1938).
See Exner, Neumann, 9.
Exner emphasized that at the time “chemistry was mainly cultivated in Germany in mines and smelting works” (Exner, Neumann, 9). This may be an overstatement, but it is important to note that in eighteenth-century Germany, as in Sweden, metallurgy was a very significant site of chemical practice.
See Exner, Neumann, 25. Observation of facts in the arts and craft was a part of “experimental history” (historia experimentalis) in eighteenth-century chemistry. On historia experimentalis see Ursula Klein, “Experimental History and Herman Boerhaave’s Chemistry of Plants,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34, 2003, 533–67 and “Experiments at the Intersection of Experimental History, Technological Inquiry, and Conceptually Driven Analysis: A Case Study from Early Nineteenth-Century France,” Perspectives on Science 13, 2005, 1–48; Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-Century Science: A Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
See Exner, Neumann; Grünhagen, “Einrichtung Apotheken”; Manfred Stürzbecher, Berlins alte Apotheken (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1965).
Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 62.
William H. Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 436.
This attitude accorded with the venture of natural and experimental history of the time (see footnote 92).
Lorenz Crell, “Vorrede,” Chemisches Journal 1778, 9–20, on 12. In 1781 the journal was renamed Die neuesten Entdeckungen in der Chemie, and in 1784 it was renamed again to Chemische Annalen für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst und Manufakturen. For a more detailed analysis of Crell’s journal see Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 62–95.
Crell, “Vorrede,” 19.
The list is preserved almost in its entirety, but Königsberg is missing. It provides information about the names of the owners of apothecary’s shops, administrators (Provisor) and clerks, and of the town in which the apothecary’s shops were located. In 1928 Adlung transcribed and published the list in alphabetical order by name; see Alfred Adlung, “Apothekenbesitzer, Apothekengehilfen und –lehrlinge Preußens im Jahre 1798,” Archiv für Sippenforschung und alle verwandten Gebiete 5, 1928, 163–66, 200–03; 229–32, 280–83. See also Alfred Adlung, “Alte Apothekerfamilien und ihre Apotheken,” Pharmazeutische Zeitung 73, 1928, 1453–60.
As information about subscribers exists only for the earlier period of 1784–89, a direct, accurate comparison of the individual subscribers and the total number of Prussian apothecaries (owners and Provisors of apothecary’s shops) is not possible. Hence my comparison yields only an estimation, which relies on the presupposition that the number of apothecaries did not change dramatically in the period from 1784 to 1800. For a list of all subscribers to Crell’s journal see Hufbauer, “German Chemical Community,” 272–99.
Nevertheless they were distributed over the whole country, including such distant towns as Bielefeld, Halle and Stettin.
See my tentative distinction of four different groups of apothecaries above.
For the impact on Crell’s income see Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 85.
Martius, Erinnerungen, 63.
Ibid., 39.
The name Almanach (almanac) refers to a calendar included at the beginning of the journal, which listed pharmaceutical preparations for each month.
Johann Friedrich A. Göttling, “Vorbericht,” Almanach 1786. On Göttling’s journal see also Bettina Wahrig, “Apotheke – Öffentlichkeit – Publikum. Zur Geschichte eines Dreiecksverhältnisses,” 9–28, in Apotheke und Publikum: Die Vorträge der Pharmaziehistorischen Biennale in Karlsruhe vom 26. bis 28. April 2002, Christoph Friedrich and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, eds. (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2003).
Göttling, “Vorbericht,” Almanach, 1792.
Ibid. In the subsequent volume Göttling wrote that his “pocketbook is mainly destined to seek out the defects of the apothecary trade, to make proposals for their improvement, and to banish them,” “Vorerinnerung,” Almanach 1793.
Göttling, “Vorbericht,” Almanach 1783.
See footnote 92.
Göttling, “Vorbericht,” Almanach 1785.
Lorenz Crell, “Anzeige chemischer Schriften: Almanach oder Taschenbuch für Scheidekünstler und Apotheker auf das Jahr 1781,” Die neuesten Entdeckungen in der Chemie 1, 233–34. Unfortunately, Göttling did not provide information about the names or number of subscribers to his journal.
Ibid., 234.
Göttling, “Vorbericht,” Almanach 1787.
Lorenz Crell, “Anzeige chemischer Schriften: Almanach oder Taschenbuch für Scheidekünstler und Apotheker auf das J. 1790. Erstes Jahr,” Chemische Annalen, pt. 2, 1790, 79–85, on 79.
Göttling, Almanach 1789, 176–81, on 176–77.
For further details, see Klein, “Innovation.”
Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 62 and 89.
See also Klein, “Experiments at the Intersection,” and Klein and Lefèvre, Materials.
See Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 180–81; Stürzbecher, “Apotheken,” 44–45; Georg Edmund Dann, “Marggraf Briefe,” Geschichte der Pharmazie 20, 1968, 20–23.
The papers were published in the Miscellanea Berolinensia (in Latin) and the Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin (in French) of the Berlin Society of Sciences and later, Academy of Sciences, respectively (from 1744). A list of Marggraf’s works is contained in: Otto Köhnke, Gesammtregister über die in den Schriften der Akademie von 1700–1899 erschienenen wissenschaftlichen Abhandlungen und Festreden (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900). Marggraf’s papers were also republished in German: Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, Chymische Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1761–67).
See “Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Bestand Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1700–1811)”: I–XIII–19, folio 36–47; in the following abbreviated as ABBAW.
Lorenz Crell, “Lebensgeschichte Andreas Sigismund Marggraf’s, Directors der physikalischen Klasse der Königl. Preuß. Akademie, Mitglieds der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Paris und der Churfürstl. Maynzischen zu Erfurt,” Chemische Annalen, pt. 1, 1786, 181–92, on 181.
Crell, “Lebensgeschichte Marggraf’s,” 182–83.
For Klaproth’s biography, see Dann, Klaproth and “Klaproth, Paecken und Liphardt,” Pharmazeutische Zeitung 26, 1971, 932–39); E. G. Fischer, “Denkschrift auf Klaproth,” Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin 1818/19, 1820, 11–26; Michael Engel, “Zwischen Beruf und Berufung: Klaproth, Hermbstädt, Rose, Gehlen – Aus dem chemischen Alltag zwischen 1775 und 1800 am Beispiel Berlin,” 259–83 in Apotheker und Universität: die Vorträge der Pharmaziehistorichen Biennale in Leipzig vom 12. bis 14. Mai 2000, Christoph Friedrich and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, eds. (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002).
The description was part of Johann Friedrich Westrumb’s autobiographical notes, which were published by August Westrumb, “Johann Friedrich Westrumb, Dr. der Medicin, Königl. Großbrit. Hannover. Berg-Commissar und Apotheker in Hameln,” Neues Vaterländisches Archiv, Hannover 7, 1825, 23–42, 26. It should be noted that Westrumb’s MD was a honorary degree from Marburg University, awarded in 1811.
Mohrenstraße 5 (Zietenplatz) is only a few meters from the Czech Embassy that hosted the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science from 1994 until 2006.
He also enjoyed the tutelage of Rose’s children, one of whom, Valentin Rose Jr. (1762–1807), became a well-known apothecary-chemist.
See Klaproth’s list of publications included in Dann, Klaproth, 110–28.
For a scientific biography of Achard see Hans-Heinrich Müller, Franz Carl Achard (1753 bis 1821), (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Albert Bartens, 2002).
See ABBAW I–XIII–26, folio 11.
See ABBAW I–XIII–26, folio 131.
See ABBAW I–XIII–26, folio 65–66.
Hufbauer presented the pharmaceutical art as a “realm of recipes,” and the apothecaries who also became chemists as men who “transcended” this realm (“German Chemical Community,” 55). Accordingly, he asserted that there was “a gap between compounding medicines and pursuing chemistry” (56). More recently, Simon made similar claims with respect to late eighteenth-century French pharmacy (Simon, “Chemistry”).
On cameralism and chemically trained cameralists in eighteenth-century Germany, see R. Andre Wakefield, “Police Chemistry,” Science in Context 12, 1999, 231–67.
See Simon Schaffer, “Experimenter’s Techniques, Dyer’s Hands, and the Electrical Planetarium,” Isis 88, 1997, 456–83, on 482.
See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
As I did not scrutinize in this paper the contents of the chemical texts written by apothecary-chemists, I omit here epistemological criteria. Parenthetically, however, I would like to add that there is no way to sort out the books and journal articles on chemistry written by well-known German apothecary-chemists (my group four) and chemists educated at universities; see Klein, “Innovation.”
This thesis is usually ascribed to Edgar Zilsel, but I found no unambiguous evidence that Zilsel actually postulated a hybrid persona of scholar and craftsman in the early modern period. What he claimed repeatedly was that the social prejudice against manual labor was overcome, and that in so doing rationally trained scholars adopted the experimental method. See, for example, Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47, 1942, 544–62.
Rupert Hall, “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution,” 3–23 in Critical Problems in the History of Science: Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, September 11, 1957, Marshall Clagett, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 17.
Hall, “Scholar and Craftsman,” 7.
Thomas S. Kuhn, “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” 31–65 in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Thomas S. Kuhn, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Kuhn attributed some stronger influence by practitioners on the transformations of the classical sciences than Hall; for example, he also stated that “the concern of artist-engineers with these classical fields was a significant factor in their transformation,” 56.
It is questionable whether Hall’s and Kuhn’s views were correct with respect to other sciences, but I do not deal with this issue here.
Hall, “Scholar and Craftsman,” 19.
Ibid.; weighing was indeed an intrinsic concern of practioners such as apothecaries and assayers. For the relationship between assayers and chemists in the early modern period, see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002); Ursula Klein, Verbindung und Affinitität: die Grundlegung der Neuzeitlichen Chemie an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994).
Kuhn, “Traditions,” 57.
Ibid, 58: “Excepting chemistry, which had found a variegated institutional base by the end of the seventeenth century, the Baconian and classical sciences flourished in different national settings from at least 1700.”
Especially in Germany, the teaching of chemistry at medical faculties had a long tradition going back to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Between 1720 and 1780 the number of salaried chairs for chemistry at German medical faculties rose from six in 1720 to twenty-eight in 1780; see Hufbauer, German Chemical Community, 34.
It should be noted that on the eighteenth-century European continent the term “laboratory” referred mostly to sites of pharmaceutical manufacture and chemical experimentation, as well as to places where production and chemical technological inquiry intersected, such as arsenals, assaying shops, distilleries and mining boards. By contrast, eighteenth-century experimental philosophy or physics, as a rule, did not establish laboratories.
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Klein, U. (2007). Apothecary-Chemists in Eighteenth-Century Germany. In: Principe, L.M. (eds) New Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry. Archimedes New Studies In The History And Philosophy Of Science and Technology, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6278-0_6
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