Oxfords Invisible Chemists The City Apothecaries and their Laboratories

4 OXFORD S INVISIBLE CHEMISTS THE CITY APOTHECARIES AND THEIR LABORATORIES 

Carole Brookes was able to identify over 40 apothecaries or commercial chemists operating in Oxford in the latter half of the seventeenth century, most of whose premises (when they could be identified) were on or just off the High Street, Turl Street, and thereabouts. Needless to say, most of them would have possessed furnaces, stills, crucibles, and other standard pieces of apparatus, and 

All locations tracked down and identified by Carole Brookes see her thesis Experimental Chemistry in Oxford (note 27). Drawing, based on Loggan, by Allan Chapman. 

Of course, there is no evidence that Crosse, Tillyard, or any of their colleagues were concerned with Aristotle s concept of substance or with van Helmont s ideas on fermentation, but they do remind us that Boyle, Willis, and their academic colleagues were not the only men in Oxford who knew a retort from a bolthead. It would also have meant that a chemically literate community was routinely present in the city, whose members could not only supply necessary materials to the scientists, but also offer practical advice, and even recommend likely boys or men to act as laboratory assistants. One would, for instance, like to know the name and background of the anonymous pumper whom Boyle employed to assist him and Hooke in their groundbreaking air-pump experiments at Deep Hall in 1659. One presumes that he would have been the technician who operated the airpump, thereby leaving Boyle and Hooke free to observe what was happening to the experiment set up in the glass receiver. 

---