Balsamo, Joseph

Joseph Balsamo was born in 1743 at Palermo, where his parents were tradespeople in a... 

In his series of novels Joseph Balsamo, Memoirs of a Doctor, Alexander Dumas compounded the excesses already associated with the chemist when his protagonist combines hypnosis with chemistry to allow him to manipulate his victims minds. Overall, the image that persists in the popular imagination is one of mystical alchemy rather than modern chemistry, even though over the course of the twentieth century chemistry has established itself as a respectable scientific department in most modem universities. In novels, chemistry is almost always represented as a strange, foreign science, with its origins in distant lands, whose importation into our society serves only to destabilize it. While other collective sciences are sometimes... 

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