Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution by William R. Newman University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003, 348 pp. ISBN 022657714 7 (paper), $27.50
Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of the Helmontian Chymistry by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 344 pp. ISBN 0226577112 (cloth), $40 reviewed by A. Truman Schwartz
It is safe to say that few readers of this Journal have ever heard of George Starkey or his creation and alter ego, Eirenaeus Philalethes. Yet, according to William Newman, professor of history of science at Indiana University, Starkey was probably the best known and most widely read American scientist before Benjamin Franklin. Moreover, Starkey/Philalethes exerted considerable influence on at least three heroes of the scientific revolution—Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. This fascinating character is the principal subject of these two scholarly monographs. Gehennical Fire was first published in 1994 by Harvard University Press and has been reissued, with a new forward, by the University of Chicago Press. Alchemy Tried in the Fire is a more recent work. Because of their common content, these books will be reviewed together. Factual knowledge of George Starkey’s life is fragmentary. He was born as George Stirk in Bermuda in 1628, the son of a Scottish minister. Some time after 1639, young George moved to the American colonies. In 1643 he matriculated at Harvard College, where he received his A.B. in 1646. He subsequently married, and in 1650 he and his family immigrated to England. He died in the Great Plague of 1665. Gehennical Fire literally means “hell fire,” but it also refers to the alkahest, a powerful agent able to convert matter to its ultimate constituents and an essential ingredient in creating the Philosophers’ Stone. In one of his writings Starkey claims to have prepared the alkahest from the spirit of wine (ethanol) and human urine. He does not tell us how he solved the storage problem that would be presented by this universal solvent. Newman’s book is a more or less chronological study of Starkey’s life and work. Chapter 1 describes his education at Harvard and offers evidence of the nature of science instruction there in mid-17th century. A mechanicalcorpuscular approach to matter theory was taught, and students participated in disputation and debate about alchemical topics. There appear to have been a surprising number of alchemical believers and practitioners at Harvard and elsewhere in colonial New England. www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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Chapter 2 indicates that Starkey wasted no time in establishing himself in medical and scientific circles on his arrival in England. Within a few months, he had initiated correspondence with Robert Boyle and apparently cured him of “a violent & sudden fitt of Sicknesse” with a “Strange Remedy” and “without the wonted Martyrdome of Physicke.” Newman argues that Starkey was Boyle’s most influential source of information about chemical practice and theory. Alchemy Tried in the Fire, written with Lawrence Principe, an expert on Boyle, carries this line of reasoning even further. Boyle’s chemical sophistication increased markedly after he met Starkey; and Boyle’s “Essay on Poisons” (1656–57) and other works owe a considerable debt to the American. Surprisingly, this debt is seldom acknowledged. Boyle does cite with admiration the writings of Eirenaeus Philalethes, an American adept possessed of the secret of the elixir. George Starkey introduced the work of this literal “peaceful lover of truth” to the English intelligentsia and served as Philalethes’s “editor.” Amazingly, neither Boyle nor anyone else appears to have suspected that Starkey was also the author of The Marrow of Alchemy and a handful of other works attributed to the mysterious colonial alchemist. In fact, some critics complained that it was unfortunate that the highminded writings of Eirenaeus Philalethes were distributed by such a disreputable and disagreeable fellow as Starkey. Philalethes’ style fits the stereotype of alchemical literature. It is full of obscure symbolism and arcane references. For example, ingredients include a hermaphrodite, a mad dog, the doves of Diana, a chameleon, “the menstrual blood of our whore,” and “a Fiery Dragon, which hides the Magical Chalybs in his own belly”. Even statements that use familiar chemical terms, for example “the mercury of iron which is a mature form of sulfur,” make no sense. Therefore, Newman faces a major challenge in Chapter 4, a translation of some passages from Philalethes into modern chemical terms. Unfortunately, this reviewer does not know enough about alchemical iconography and symbolism to offer an opinion on the correctness of the interpretation. In marked contrast to this intentional obfuscation, Starkey’s laboratory notebooks are at least somewhat comprehensible to a modern chemist. Alchemy Tried in the Fire reproduces several pages of the manuscript text, and they are even easy to read—if one reads Latin, that is. (Newman and Principe have translated and annotated these notebooks, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004.) In chapters 3 and 4 of Alchemy Tried in the Fire, the authors analyze Starkey’s laboratory methodology as represented in his notebooks. They make a strong case that the manuscripts reveal “a surprising degree of quantitative reasoning and gravimetric technique.” Moreover, the notebooks are orderly, methodical, and show both theory-guided practice and practice-influenced theory. In short, in his “every-day” persona, Starkey is acting more like a chemist than an alchemist. I will return to that important idea at the end of this review, but first let me offer a few comments on some of
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Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews George Starkey’s other lives. (The plural in the subtitle of Gehennical Fire is clearly intentional.) As Philalethes, Starkey was an alchemical adept and philosopher, but he was also a practicing chemist, a metallurgist, a manufacturer of oils, perfumes, and medicines, and a physician. Some of these lives overlapped, especially in his role as an iatrochemist or medicinal chemist. Like Paracelsus, he was a strong believer in the power of chemicals to cure sickness and a severe critic of Galen’s theory of humors. In 1660 Starkey published a tract on the medicinal powers of dilute sulfuric acid, entitled The Admirable Efficacy And almost incredible Virtue of true Oyl, which is made of Sulphur-Vive. He was also the inventor of a powerful Pill and (almost) Universal Antidote, apparently a copper salt. It got him involved in some nasty priority disputes that depleted his already meager financial resources. Starkey was no stranger to polemic, and in 1657 he proposed a public contest between his iatrochemistry and the outmoded methods of the Galenists or “Goosequil Pisseprophets,” as he called them. The subjects in this clinical trial would be the sick, who would be subjected to the ministrations of one or the other of the contending schools of medicine. Starkey promised that chemicals would allow him to perform all his cures “without bloud-letting, purging by any promiscuous Purge, or vomitting by any promiscuous Vomit”. It seems that no one took up the challenge, but in 1665, a natural experiment presented itself when the Great Plague struck London. George Thomson contracted the disease, and Starkey treated his friend with powder made from a dried toad. To be doubly safe, Thomson hung a large dried toad around his neck. He survived, but unfortunately Starkey did not. Explaining this failure of “physician cure thyself ” proved a bit embarrassing, but Thomson attributed his friend’s untimely demise to the “immoderate ingurgitation of dull flat Small beer”, which interfered with the efficacy of the medicines. Thus, the multiple lives of George Starkey ended at age 37. One of the central themes of both of these books is that the traditional dichotomy between alchemy and chemistry is overstated. The authors argue that the mystical, spiritual
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dimension of alchemy has been greatly romanticized and over emphasized by 19th century occultists and M. A. Atwood, Carl Jung, and Maricea Eliade. The search for the Philosophers’ Stone was only part of alchemy; the other major goal was to experimentally determine the fundamental constituents of matter. In an effort to recognize the continuity between alchemy and chemistry, Newman and Principe prefer the term chymistry to represent the activities of Starkey and his tribe. The emphasis then is on evolution, not revolution, and Starkey emerges as a key figure in this transition. Gehennical Fire ends with a chapter detailing the influence of Eirenaeus Philalethes on Newton, and Alchemy Tried in the Fire concludes with an analysis of Starkey’s impact on Boyle and ultimately on the Chemical Revolution. Although The Sceptical Chymist disparages the “vulgar spagirists”, Newman and Principe offer convincing evidence that Boyle borrowed heavily from Van Helmont and suggest that Starkey was the most likely conduit. On the other hand, Boyle did not use Van Helmont’s quantitative approach to chemistry. Thus, one can assert that Boyle is less original and less modern than he is typically held to be. But Van Helmont’s emphasis on gravimetric techniques, mass balance, and the conservation of matter was transmitted via Starkey and others to the French chemists of the late 18th century. Significantly, the epigram of Alchemy Tried in the Fire is from Lavoisier: “It is easy to see that almost all the discoveries of this kind, which we have usually attributed to Mr. Boyle, really belong to Van Helmont, and that the latter has even carried his theory much farther.” These books are not casual reading. They are thorough works of scholarship, written primarily for historians of science. However, they should have great appeal to chemists interested in the origins of the discipline. The two titles form a complementary set. I recommend reading Gehennical Fire first. Once you have finished it, you just might want to continue. A. Truman Schwartz is in the Chemistry Department of Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN 55105.
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