Anatomical Mercury: Changing Understandings of Quicksilver, Blood, and the Lymphatic System, 1650-1800.

The use of mercury as an injection mass in anatomical experiments and preparations was common throughout Europe in the long eighteenth century, and refined mercury-injected preparations as well as plates of anatomical mercury remain today. The use and meaning of mercury in related disciplines such as medicine and chemistry in the same period have been studied, but our knowledge of anatomical mercury is sparse and tends to focus on technicalities. This article argues that mercury had a distinct meaning in anatomy, which was initially influenced by alchemical and classical understandings of mercury. Moreover, it demonstrates that the choice of mercury as an anatomical injection mass was deliberate and informed by an intricate cultural understanding of its materiality, and that its use in anatomical preparations and its perception as an anatomical material evolved with the understanding of the circulatory and lymphatic systems. By using the material culture of anatomical mercury as a starting point, I seek to provide a new, object-driven interpretation of complex and strongly interrelated historiographical categories such as mechanism, vitalism, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, which are difficult to understand through a historiography that focuses exclusively on ideas.

"Rusticall chymistry": Alchemy, saltpeter projects, and experimental fertilizers in seventeenth-century English agriculture.

As the primary ingredient in gunpowder, saltpeter was an extraordinarily important commodity in the early modern world. Historians of science and technology have long studied its military applications but have rarely focused on its uses outside of warfare. Due to its potential effectiveness as a fertilizer, saltpeter was also an integral component of experimental agricultural reform movements in the early modern period and particularly in seventeenth-century England. This became possible for several reasons: the creation of a thriving domestic saltpeter production industry in the second half of the sixteenth century; the development of vitalist alchemical theories that sought a unified explanation for the "growth" of minerals, metals, and plants; the rise of experimental natural philosophy; and the mid-seventeenth-century dominance of the English East India Company in the saltpeter trade, which allowed agricultural reformers to repurpose domestically produced saltpeter in agriculturally productive ways. This paper argues that the Hartlib Circle - a loose network of natural philosophers and social reformers - adopted vitalist matter theories and the practical, experimental techniques of alchemists to transform agriculture into a more productive enterprise. Though their grandiose plans never came to fruition, their experimental trials to develop artificial fertilizers played an early role in the origins and development of saline chemistry, agronomy, and the British Agricultural Revolution.

[Alchemy, freemasonry and homeopathy]. / Alchimie, franc-maçonnerie et homéopathie.

In this article we are showing that homeopathic doctrine has really esoteric and occult origins as it was suspected by a few authors, nevertheless we saw Hahnemann also using scientific writers. As early as twenty-two years old Hahnemann was initiate in the freemasonry, very in vogue at that time. He will be life long attached to it and will keep close to distinguished freemasons. Freemasonry has conveid enlightement philosophical ideas as well as occult, alchemical and theosophical ones by successive incursion of very different orders. Among these we can find a few rosicrucians orders. At the beginning of 17th century in Germany, the first rosicrucians authors appealed to Paracelse, and the first members of their legendary fraternity manifested their contempt for the practice of transmutation into gold and must devote themselves to gratuitous medical practice (famous utopia). Freemasonry took again these philanthropic views so that Hahnemann was certainly involved to the ideas of Paracelse and his followers through the Rosicrucians which played a substantial part within freemasonry before homeopathy rose.

Alchemy, homeopathy and the treatment of borderline cases.

Homeopathy is presented as a modality of potential usefulness in the treatment of borderline patients refractory to psychoanalytic work. In these instances a minimally adequate centre of consciousness did not solidify from the identity with the psychoid stratum. In the view of Alchemy, this failure of the mind to separate from the unio naturalis or massa confusa could be remedied by a medicamentum spagyricum, an archtypal essence acting according to the simile principle, which was to be extracted from various substances. Homeopathy is described as a modern, clinically effective modification of the alchemistic method. Two cases example are given for illustration.

Alchemy as studies of life and matter: reconsidering the place of vitalism in early modern chemistry.

Early modern alchemy studied both matter and life, much like today's life sciences. What material life is and how it comes about intrigued alchemists. Many found the answer by assuming a vital principle that served as the source and cause of life. Recent literature has presented important cases in which vitalist formulations incorporated corpuscular or mechanical elements that were characteristic of the New Science and other cases in which vitalist thinking influenced important figures of the Scientific Revolution. Not merely speculative, vitalist ideas also motivated chymical practice. The unity of life science and material science that is found in many formulations of Renaissance alchemy disintegrated in Georg Ernst Stahl's version of post-Cartesian vitalism.

"Paradoxes, absurdities, and madness": conflict over alchemy, magic and medicine in the works of Andreas Libavius and Heinrich Khunrath.

Both Andreas Libavius and Heinrich Khunrath graduated from Basel Medical Academy in 1588, though the theses they defended reveal antithetical approaches to medicine, despite their shared interests in iatrochemistry and transmutational alchemy. Libavius argued in favour of Galenic allopathy while Khunrath promoted the contrasting homeopathic approach of Paracelsus and the utility of the occult doctrine of Signatures for medical purposes. This article considers these differences in the two graduates' theses, both as intimations of their subsequent divergent notions of the boundaries of alchemy and its relations with medicine and magic, and also as evidence of the surprisingly unstable academic status of Paracelsian philosophy in Basel, its main publishing centre, at the end of the sixteenth century.

A brief history of Indian alchemy covering pre-Vedic to Vedic and Ayurvedic period (circa 400 B.C.-800 A.D.).

History of Indian alchemy can be traced to pre-Vedic period. The archaeological excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the Indus valley have brought to light that, the people in ancient India were possessing chemical knowledge as early as in the pre-historic period. In Vedic period single herbs were prescribed. Minerals and animal substances were also prescribed but no compound preparations were in use. Alchemy in India, was started for the preparation of an elixir of life for imparting immortality and later for the transmutation process for converting base metals into gold. Indian alchemy derived its colour and flavour to a large extent from the Tantric cult. Then, during the iatro-chemical period all the previous accumulated alchemical ideas were put into something more practical and tangible. a number of preparations of mercury and other metals were evolved as helpful accessories in medicine. Here a bried history of this Indian alchemy is presented which will give an idea about the development of chemical knowledge in India in its multiple aspects.

The doctrine of signatures: a historical, philosophical and scientific view (I).

The evolution of the Doctrine of Signatures is presented, with reference to a physical as well as mental/spiritual mode of relating nature's medicinal substances to the human symptoms. Symbolism, intuition, biological observation, and the study of the medicinal properties serve as guides in the Doctrine of Signatures; modern science offers additional dimensions by relating physiological processes to physiology of disease.