Middle Ages, chemistry

In the late middle ages, chemistry was the science and technology closest to philosophy, the material realization of the method of analysis and synthesis. No longer. Contemporary philosophy is concerned with many sciences—physics, psychology, biology, linguistics, economics—but chemistry is not among them. Why not ... 

Argues that this most influential treatise on chemistry of the late Middle Ages was most probably written by Paul of Taranto, rather than, as usually assumed, Geber... 

Alchemical theories are central to the middle ages and the Renaissance. Chaucer and Shakespeare were heavily steeped in the subject, and it still exerts a fascination today. This is a scholarly and accessible introduction to Western European alchemy, and to the iconography of Alchemical works from antiquity to the rise of chemistry. It includes an illustrated glossary of Alchemical terms and biographies of major alchemists. It is intended for students of medieval and Renaissance art, literature and history art historians and anyone with a general interest in the history and principles of alchemy or medieval culture... 

Contents I. Alchemy - the chemistry of the Middle Ages II. The birth of chemistry... 

More detailed accounts of alchemy in the middle ages can be found in William R. Newmans work on Geber, The Summa Perfectionis of Psetido-Geber (Leiden Brill, 1991). Excellent readings on the history of distillation can be found in Allen G. Debus, Fire Analysis and the Elements in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, Ann. Sci. 23 (1967), 127-147 and in Robert P. Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry (New York Franklin Watts, 1967). 

For the history of science in the middle ages Roger Bacon is a more interesting personality than Vincent or Albertus, for while the latter were mainly recorders and interpreters of the natural science of this time, Bacon was more passionately interested in the accomplishments of scientific discoveries and aims. He possessed the fervor of a missionary in presenting the claims of science to the attention of his contemporaries, and an imagination which enabled him to look beyond the state of experimental science in his own time to a future of greater possibilities. It is evident that he was a zealous student of several branches of science especially of mathematics, physics (notably of optics), astronomy and the chemistry of his time. 

It was however not Paracelsus who first introduced the use of salts of the metals and similar products of chemistry into medical practice. The Materia Medica of Dioscorides and the Natural History of Pliny bear evidence that such substances were much used in their time. But in the middle ages, their use was more limited and conventionalized. To be sure the use of chemical medicines was being slowly extended principally through the initiative of Italian and Spanish practitioners, before Paracelsus, and it is possible that in Italy Paracelsus received this impulse. 

Although chemistry has been important for millennia in its practical application to the needs and luxuries of human life, the discipline has not always been called chemistry. It has existed in very different forms, and in very different relations to neighboring sciences and crafts, in a flux that only accelerated as the years passed. The goals and concepts of a Chinese or Arabic alchemist of antiquity or the Middle Ages differed greatly from those of a chemist of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, just as the aims and ideas of nineteenth-century research chemists were different from those of their predecessors and successors. 

An historical aside may clarify the issues. In the medical tradition that went from the ancients (Hippocrates and Galen) through the Middle Ages until the Enlightenment, physicians basically thought about disease in terms of mechanism. The conventional theory of humors was a crude attempt to describe illness in terms of imbalances in body composition, before the invention of modern chemistry and biochemistry. 

In the Middle Ages, Muslim scientists Jabir bin Hayyan - the first to use lab equipment - was known as Geber, or the Father of Chemistry in Europe and Abu Bakr-AI-Razi (865-925) both greatly contributed in chemistry s early beginnings. 

In the Middle Ages, many early chemists tried to change, or transmute, ordinary metals into gold. Although they made many discoveries that contributed to the development of modern chemistry, their attempts to transmute metals were doomed from the start. These early chemists did not realize that a transmutation, whereby one element changes into another, is a nuclear reaction. It changes the nucleus of an atom and therefore cannot be achieved by ordinary chemical means. 

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