Chemical practitioners

Boerhaave apparently conducted a great deal of chemical experimentation with much patience and care. Yet he seems out of the main stream of the thinking of chemical practitioners. He tacitly admitted this in the Author s Preface, where he states that he little imagined that he should do anything in chemistry ... 

In the face of this massive unavailability of experimental data for the vast majority of chemicals, practitioners in drug discovery and hazard assessment have developed the use of nonempirical parameters to estimate molecular properties. By... 

In this chapter I will try to explain why the creation of the Dutch chemical society occurred relatively late, and why it took on a hybrid character from the start. We will show that the founding of the NCV was the result of a carefully negotiated equilibrium between different groups of chemists, and also that initial opposition within academic circles had to be overcome. In order to understand these peculiarities of the Dutch case, it is important to first tell more about the institutional and social development of chemistry in the Netherlands up to 1903. In the course of this historical sketch the mutual relations and conflicts between the different groups of chemical practitioners will become clear, and also why the NCV was not founded earlier. 

Just before these clashes between Delft and the universities intensified, two former students of van t Hoff and a chemical engineer who had studied at Delft sent a circular letter to at least 600 chemical practitioners in the Netherlands. The circular summarized a draft version of the by-laws of a nationwide chemical society which they intended to establish, and contained an appeal to visit a meeting which would be held in The Hague on 15th April 1903." ... 

That the early NCV was not a well-balanced representation of the Dutch community of chemical practitioners as a whole is also shown clearly when we look at the schools and universities where the founding members of the society had studied. Institutions that the founders of the society came from were overrepresented Delft, Amsterdam and Utrecht accounted for more than 80% of the members whose (Dutch) educational background is known (in this calculation I excluded the foreign universities because almost all those who studied abroad also studied at one of the Dutch institutions). Rutten (Delft), Jorissen and Reicher (Amsterdam) and the first president of the society, Cohen (Utrecht), who had studied in Amsterdam, obviously had used their personal networks to recruit members into the new society. As a result, the early NCV was dominated by chemical engineers from Delft and chemists that came from the Amsterdam school of van t Hoff - to which Jorissen, Reicher and Cohen belonged. Organic chemists from the Leiden school of Franchimont were clearly under-represented. 

Were specific groups of chemical practitioners excluded from membership ... 

We use the term technologist as an analytical term to highlight the specific social and epistemic status of eighteenth-century chemical practitioners, who often were not merely apprenticed artisans but also academicians. On eighteenth-century chemists dual career patterns as savant-technologists, see Klein [2005b] and the secondary literature quoted there. 

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