The Gold-Makers

How is it then, that we nevertheless can see alchemy as the dawn of modem chemistry It has to do with the fact that the alchemists were the first to set up real chemical laboratories in which they worked out many of the basic methods that are still used in modern chemistry. Furthermore, alchemy represented all the knowledge of inorganic chemistry at the time and must have played a significant role in the development of metallurgic processes used in the economically 

It is striking how the history of alchemy runs parallel to that of medicine. Its practitioners were often physicians and when classical medicine took refuge in the Islamic world from the upheavals and cultural decline in Western Europe, which followed on the fall of the Roman Empire, it was accompanied by alchemy. For many centuries, both medicine and alchemy survived and flourished in the Islamic countries and several of the leading names in Islamic medicine were also alchemists, the best known being Rhazes and Avicenna. It is worth noting that these medical paragons seem to have been more interested in the supposed ability of the philosopher s stone to cure disease, than in its use to transmute base metals into gold. When medicine eventually returned to Western Europe from the Arab Empire, alchemy followed in its footsteps. 

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