Fulhame, Elizabeth

In 1794, the English chemist Elizabeth Fulhame published a book called An Essay on Combustion. Her book included many of the first recorded ideas about the role of catalysis in chemical processes. 

Elizabeth Fulhame was a pioneer researcher in redox chemistry and the author of An Essay on Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phogistic and Antiphlogistic hypotheses are proved erroneous. See Davenport, D. A. (2004). Fulhame, E. (fl. 1780-1794). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, http //www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/39778, accessed 4 Nov 2004. 

The first woman to apply for membership of the Pharmaceutical Society was Elizabeth Leech in 1869.10 Leech had learned her pharmacy skills from her father, having worked in his shop for 7 years. Following his death, she shared the running of the shop with her brother for 6 years and then on her own for another 9 years. The Lancashire cotton famine had forced her out of business, and she had then become compounder and dispenser of prescriptions at the Munster House Lunatic Asylum, Fulham. Her application noted that she believed that membership in the Pharmaceutical Society would help her resume her business. Fearful that the Council might think she was a troublemaker, she wrote I have no wish upon any occasion to interfere with the Council or its meetings. All I want is the Membership. 11 The Council rejected her request a total of three times, the last being in 1872. 

This wonderfully assertive nonapology for daring to author a book precedes by about 140 years a similar nonapology by the brilliant Elizabeth Fulhame introducing her own Essay on Combustion in 1794 (see Figure 220). 

Mrs. Elizabeth Fulhame, whom Laidler calls a forgotten genius, authored a remarkable book (Figure 220) published in 1794 (German translation, 1798 American edition, 1810 see Figure 221). Women were not only not encouraged. 

FIGURE 220. Title page of Mrs. Elizabeth Fulhame s book on the theory of combustion. Laidler calls her a forgotten genius who first demonstrated photoimaging and may rightly be called the mother of mechanistic chemistry (from The Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, a collection in the Othmer Library, CHF). 

Mrs. Elizabeth Fulhame, of whom nothing seems to be known except that she was the wife of a doctor, was an early convert to Lavoisier s theory. In 1794 she published a very interesting Essay on Combustion (now very scarce), which attracted general attention. She was elected an honorary member of the... 

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