Freind, John

Freind, John. Chymical lectures. London For Aaron Ward, 1737. 

John Freind at Oxford (1675-1728) was the first person to realize that inter-molecnlar forces are of shorter range than gravity. 

Hales then refers to John Freind who has from the same principles given a very ingenious Rationale of the chief operations in Chymistry. Freind was one of the Englishman who in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were trying to apply mechanical principles to chemical phenomena. But, Hales added, it is important to gain more information from experience. 

As already noted, Newton replaced the concept of mechanical entanglement with the postulate of short-range interparticle forces of attraction and repulsion and applied this model in his Principia of 1687 to rationalize Boyle s law relating gas pressure and volume. However, it was not until the first decade of the 18th century that this new dynamic or force model was first specifically applied to chemical phenomena by the British chemists, John Freind and John Keill, and by Newton himself in the finalized version of the 31st query appended to the 1717 and later editions of his famous treatise on optics, where he succinctly summarized his new particulate program for chemistry ... 

John Freind (1675-1728), English physician and chemist, publishes Praelectiones Chemicae, one of the earliest attempts to use Newtonian principles to explain chemical phenomena. 

John Freind, Praelectiones chymicae (Oxford, 1709) [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz], Acta eruditorum, 1710, 412-16. 

Read in r/jcMuleuni Oxford, 1704. By John Freind, M,D. Student... 

FIGURE 233. Title page from Dr. John Freind s 1712 book in which he attempted to use Newtonian physics to explain physical and chemical properties of matter. Newton suspected that the forces holding matter together were electrical and magnetical. 

Indeed, attempts 100 years earlier to apply the physics of the age— Newton s great work—to chemistry failed. Among the first to attempt these applications were mathematician John Keill (1671-1721) and physician John Freind (1675—1728). Newton had expressed the force arising from gravitational attraction between two bodies with the formula ... 

John Freind 1704 Richard Frewin 17087-1740 Johann Lavater ca. 1710 John Whiteside ca. 1715-20 Thomas Hughes 1740... 

The link between chemistry and anatomy was maintained when Dr Lee s Readership of Anatomy was established at Christ Church in 1767. Dr Matthew Lee (1694-1755) had practised medicine in London, becoming the physician to Frederick, Prince of Wales. In his will, he left money to found an anatomy school in Christ Church, see Figure 3.1, and a university readership in anatomy, thereby fulfilling a plan of his former medical colleague and fellow member of Christ Church, John Freind. It was a condition of Dr Lee s will that the reader had to... 

John Freind, Praelectiones Chemicae—ann. 1704, Oxonii, in Museo Ash-moleano habitae, Londini, 1709 translated as Chymical Lectures—Read at the Museum at Oxford, 1704, London, 1712. For discussions of this book see Thackray, ref. 4, and J. S. Rowlinson, Cohesion a Scientific History of Intermolecular Forces, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 19-20,26-27. Gunther, ref. 47, pp. 55-56. 

Unfortunately, we do not know what usefull and pleasant Doctrine Freind conveyed in 1704. His lectures were not published until 1709, and it is likely that he revised them considerably in the interval. Where Keill s lectures were reticent on the topic of Newton s theory of matter, Freind, with perhaps more enthusiasm than accuracy, claimed in 1709 that he would reduce chemistry to the Rules of true Philosophy, that philosophy being Newton s, to whom he dedicated his volume. Freind s premisses, he acknowledged, were based on John Keill s 1708 paper in the Philosophical Transactions. The paper, In which the laws of attraction are explained, expanded Newton s comments on matter in query 23 of the 1706 Latin Opticks into thirty theorems which... 

Subsequent lecturers implicitly echoed Crawford s criticisms of Freind s attempt to integrate chemistry and Newtonian natural philosophy. Freind s text did not become a model for others, and the teaching of chemistry did not become formalized at Oxford until the turn of the nineteenth century. Richard Frewin assumed the title of Ashmolean professor after Freind but it is not known whether he lectured on chemistry. Apparently more successful was the practically-oriented Hart Hall natural philosophy course established by Keill, who was succeeded by Desaguliers. John Whiteside, named Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1714, continued these extramural lectures and may also have lectured on chemistry. ... 

At Cambridge, as I have mentioned, John Mickleburgh s lectures included a Newtonian theoretical framework derived from Freind. But Schofield characterizes these lectures - unlike Freind s - as being clearly in a medical context , with extensive experimental demonstration and instructions for the preparation of specific pharmaceutical substances, echoing the demands of his audience of medical students. The attempts of Freind and Keill to redefine chemistry as part of natural philosophy (particularly Newtonian natural philosophy) rather than medicine remained unrealized. The central function of the universities as a training ground for the gentry declined precipitously... 

John Freind, Emmenologia (1703), trans. Thomas Dale (London T. Cox, 1729) Guerrini. Newtonian Matter Theory (n. 40), pp. 170-74 cf. Golinski, Chemical Discourse (n. 4) pp. 131-32, who seems unaware of Pitcairne s existence. 

John Freind, Chymical Lectures (1709), trans. J.M. (London Philip Gwillim for Jonah Bowyer, 1712), Preface, not paginated. 

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