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Origin of the Concept Chemical Compound

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ursula Klein
Ursula Klein
Affiliation:
Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftstheorie, Berlin
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Abstract

Most historians of science share the conviction that the incorporation of the corpuscular theory into seventeenth-century chemistry was the beginning of modern chemistry. My thesis in this paper is that modern chemisty started with the concept of the chemicl compound, which emerged at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, without any signifivant influence of the corpuscular theory. Rather the historical reconstruction of the emergence of this concept shows that it resulted from the reflection on the chemical operations in the sixteenth-century metallurgy and seventeenth-century pharmacy. I argue that the reversibility of these operations and their understanding as crafts (metallurgy) or chemical arts (pharmacy) were decisive factors for the emergence of the first ideas about chemical compounds in the seventeenth-century pharmaceutical works written by pharmaceutically trained authors, influenced by the Paracelsian image of nature. There is a direct line of descent from these authors to E.F.Geoffroy (1675–1742), who integrated the first scattered ideas of chemical compound into a general concept comprising chemical artefacts as well as natural bodies.

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Science in Context , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 163 - 204
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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