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Review of Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts Scott Smidt* Laramie County Community College, Albany County Campus, Laramie, Wyoming 82070, United States recipes, tools, and techniques to what has been called a philosophical chemistry oriented toward generating and evaluating new claims. He did this by blending the contemporary model of teaching chemistry, which had grown out of the practical needs of apothecaries, with the approach of Boyle and others like him. Furthermore, by shifting the focus from recipes to general principles, Boerhaave was able to model his chemistry courses after the more academic medical courses. In addition, he incorporated chemical principles into his medical classes, particularly physiology. Over time, Boerhaave’s method for teaching chemistry was exported to other parts of Europe by his students and through the many editions of his textbook, Elementa Chemiae, first published in 1732. Perhaps Boerhaave’s most influential improvement to the chemistry curriculum, according to Powers, was the way Boerhaave used chemical demonstrations in his classes. Not only did he perform demonstrations to illustrate principles and verify their claims, he used them to show students how experimental work could uncover new principles and form new generalizations. Another theme of Inventing Chemistry is to show how this pedagogical approach influenced Boerhaave’s work as a chemist and his views on some chemical questions of the time. In particular, Powers discusses Boerhaave’s positions on the reactivity of air, Stahl’s phlogiston, and Geoffroy’s table of chemical affinities. Powers also devotes a chapter to Boerhaave’s application of his pedagogical method to researching claims of the mercurialist school of alchemy, which Boerhaave published between 1733 and 1736 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Well written and meticulously researched (at least to this nonhistorian), Inventing Chemistry will be of particular interest to historians of science and the philosophy of science for the new perspective Powers brings to the development of chemistry as an academic discipline and Boerhaave’s role in that development. Specifically, Powers has made use of new documents available from the Khirov Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, expanding the source material beyond Boerhaave’s original textbook. Although directed more toward an audience of professional historians of science, anyone with a strong interest in the development of chemistry as a science will find the book an informative addition to the expanding literature of the transition from alchemy to chemistry.
Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts, by John C. Powers University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2012. + pp. ISBN: 978-0226677606 (hardcover). $40.00.
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f you are like me, Herman Boerhaave (1668−1738) is not a name you have heard before. No laws taught in general chemistry courses are the result of his discoveries; no method of organic synthesis bears his name. Indeed, he is not famous for any scientific discoveries at all. Instead, Boerhaave’s contributions to chemistry were mostly pedagogical. As a teacher of chemistry myself, this is what attracted me to a book about a little-known Dutch professor in the University of Leiden’s medical faculty: Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts.
Cover image provided by University of Chicago Press and reproduced with permission.
Boerhaave began his teaching career as a medical lecturer at the University of Leiden, not attaining the status of professor until he earned the school’s chair of botany and medicine in 1709. He later was awarded the chair in chemistry in 1718, although he had been allowed to teach private courses in chemistry since 1702. One of Boerhaave’s major contributions was the integration of chemistry into the medical curriculum, which improved the status of chemistry as an academic discipline. At the time, chemistry was not seen as an academic subject on equal footing with other disciplines and certainly not part of the core medical curriculum. Whereas the pedagogical practice of the medical faculty focused on theoretical precepts and their application, chemical education stressed recipes, with very little theory. As a result, chemistry was seen as a practical, not an academic, art. Boerhaave helped move chemistry from an emphasis on © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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Published: March 18, 2013 407
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400167m | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 407−407
