Records of the Historian

Zou Yan s alleged relation to alchemy is largely based on an often quoted passage of Sima Qian s Records of the Historian (Shiji ca. 90 bce). This passage describes Zou as the inspirer of some fangshi (masters of the methods) who advised various rulers to search for the medicines of immortality on Penglai and the other mythical islands in the eastern seas off the coast of Shandong ... 

Because archaeologists study the past, they are unable to observe human behaviour directly. Unlike historians, they also lack access to verbally encoded records of the past. Instead they must attempt to infer human behaviour and beliefs from the surviving remains of what people made and used before they can begin, like other social scientists, to explain phenomena. ... 

My basic purpose in this volume is, as it was in Inventing the Electronic Century, to undertake the fundamental task of the historian to record when, where, and by whom scientific and technical knowledge were commercialized into new products that created a wide variety of manmade materials central to the shaping of a modern industrial economy and manmade pharmaceuticals that sustained modern medicine. I do this by focusing on the relative successes and failures of the first movers and their close followers in the national industries of Europe and the United States. (That of Japan competed successfully in chemicals or pharmaceuticals only in Asia.) I review these histories from their beginnings through the end of the twentieth century. 

The full extent of the falsity and the immorality of this psychiatric interpretation of witchcraft becomes evident if we contrast it with the record of the Inquisition compiled and widely accepted by Christian historians and theologians. This historical interpretation, in contrast to the psychiatric, focuses on the persecutors, not the persecuted it attributes intolerance to the former, not mental illness to the latter. For example, Henry Charles Lea, the great historian of the Inquisition, has this to say about the role of the Church in the persecution of nonconformists (here, of Jews) ... 

RECORDS of the life of Basilius Valentinus, the Benedictine monk who for his achievements in the chemical sphere has been given the title of Father of Modem Chemistry, are a mass of conflicting evidence. Many and varied are the accounts of his life, and historians seem quite unable to agree as to his exact identity, or even as to the century in which he lived. It is generally believed, however, that 1394 was the year of his birth, and that he did actually join the Benedictine Brotherhood, eventually becoming Canon of the Priory of St. Peter at Erfurt, near Strasburg, although even these facts cannot be proved. 

Military Branch, Federal Records Center, General Services Administration, Region No. 3, Alexandria, Virginia— Files of the Office, Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service. These jfiles are cited by using the prefix CWS in the file number. CWS 314.7 and CWS 319.1, properly a part of this collection, are temporarily in the custody of the Office of the Historian, U.S. Army Edgewood Arsenal (formerly U.S. Army Chemical Corps Historical Office), and will be transferred to official archives. 

But this characterisation is difficult to reconcile with the historical record. Ihde, the only historian of chemistry quoted by either Maher or Lipton, identifies Mendeleev s famous paper of 1871 as the major turning-point ... 

Gorst s secret remained safe for almost 150 years. Then, a modern historian, curious about the paucity of information about Frankland s life, discovered his parish baptismal records for February 20, 1825. They explained Frankland s reticence about his past the records identify the infant Edward Frankland as the son of Peggy Frankland. . . single woman. ... 

At this stage one of the most urgent tasks is a re-investigation of a wide range of systems by other than kinetic methods, especially by spectroscopy and conductivity measurements. It may be useful to point out here that, if more investigators had taken an old-fashioned natural historian s view of their experimental material and had noted and recorded the presence or absence of colours in reacting systems, and followed up these clues, the present situation might never have arisen. 

The Roman historian, who knew not, it may be presumed, that the Divine sentence had foretold, that not one stone of the building should be left upon another and that the time was come, when the true worshippers should no longer worship there yet when he recorded the conflagration of the Temple, declared... 

Historical introductions to chemistry courses and citations in journal articles provided ample opportunity for scientists to trace family lines to suit the discipline-building task at hand and to set up a record for later historians. Ostwald made sure to settle his name into a progeny of physical chemists in his history of electrochemistry. Later, Ingold minimized the historical role of contemporary rivals by spare citations to work well known at the time. 

The very existence of these mummies provides clues as to the religion, philosophy, and technology of these ancient civilizations. Along with the surviving records, such as the Book of the Dead, which described the passage of the deceased into the afterlife, historians know something about ancient Egyptians and their beliefs. 

Other interesting and important problems revolve around the passage of time, which obscures the history of past human societies, cloaking their successes and failures in mystery. Archaeologists and historians who study fossils and written records have learned much about how people used to live and work. But chemistry can expand this frontier of knowledge by revealing more about the nature of the objects that have... 

Future historians of science may well record that one of the greatest conceptual revolutions in the twentieth-century science was the realization that hyperspace may be the key to unlock the deepest secrets of nature and Creation itself. 

In fact, all societies have invented constellations.4 The ones with which we are now familiar were developed so long ago that some of their origin is a mystery. Astro-historians believe they go back to the Mesopotamia of 2000 b.c. The earliest constellation maps were adopted by the ancient Greeks and then by the Romans who gave them Latin names that we use today. In a sense, the constellations are a record and reflection of human civilizations and their thinking (figure 9.1). The most famous constellations are in the zodiac, a set of 12 constellations that lie along the ecliptic, the plane of the Earth s orbit and of the Sun s apparent annual path. Here we see Leo the Lion, Taurus... 

Court administrators amassed many of these documents in the context of trials for alchemical fraud. Most historians will be quite familiar with these kinds of criminal records. Scholars of early modern Europe in particular have used them frequently to access the lives of individuals who otherwise did not leave a trace in archives and libraries.14 Historians of science, however, have used trial records much less frequently, particularly those from secular courts.15 These criminal records—particularly the interrogation records—are, of course, notoriously difficult to work with. The voices of accused criminals have come to us in highly mediated form, and the power dynamic involved in confessions recorded under the threat or use of torture makes them particularly problematic. As Natalie Zemon Davis has noted, however, the tales people told, even under the pressure of life and death, "can still be analyzed in terms of the life and values of the person saving his neck by a story."16 Criminal records may never tell us what "really" happened, but the fact that witnesses stories had to... 

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