Chemistry artisanal

The blowpipe is a narrow tube through which a stream of air can be blown. When applied to a flame, it produces a fine jet at a high temperature. Jewelers, glass workers, and craftsmen working with metal had used the instrument since antiquity, and it had remained a tool of skilled artisans for thousands of years before it was used in chemistry. In the eighteenth century it came into wide use as a specifically chemical instrument, first in Sweden and then, over the next half-century and more, throughout the rest of Europe. 

Boerhaave s version of the chemical instruments was a product of the university context. While he acknowledged his debt to the artisanal chemistry of the didactic textbooks, Boerhaave s empirical philosophy, skeptical attitude, and focus on establishing theoretical principles was derived from academic and philosophical traditions. The audience for his courses were medical students, whose future status in the traditional medical hierarchy and republic of letters over that of artisan-practitioners and empirics depended upon their command of philosophical knowledge. The curriculum of the Leiden medical faculty was structured to train physicians for this role, and Boerhaave designed his chemistry courses to accommodate this standard. 

Suspicion is not new. A joumaf aimed at artisans. The Chemist, was rude about Davy, for whom chemistry had been a vehicle for social mobility, propelling him from provincial poverty into the Presidency of the Royal Society and a baronetcy ... 

The Mundus included a vast array of descriptions of mining chemistry, metallurgical chemistry, and spagyrical (pharmaceutical) chemistry as well as chemistry useful to artists and artisans. Most notable, from the historical perspective, is his disbelief in alchemy, which was expounded m the Mundus. Perhaps not surprisingly, Boyle demurred at paying forty shillings for It. " ... 

One of the most demanding and exciting roles that a polymer chemist can play in the next few decades is that of molecular artisan for medicine. Few applications of polymer chemistry can so intimately touch and alter the human condition, for although the present medical role of polymers is relatively small, their potential value is enormous. 

While the collection of chemical facts continued to be enlarged by the artisan, these facts were interpreted by the philosophers— who also served as mathematicians, astronomers, anatomists, and physicists, as well as theologians and political theoreticians. In fact not until the 1800s did European scientists begin to think of their work as separate from that of philosophers. Though philosophy is common to all cultures, the most influential in the development of modern chemistry were the philosophers of Greece. These thinkers derived hypotheses about the nature of matter and material interactions that helped and hindered chemical developments over the next 2000 years. 

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