The Chemical Revolution and Pharmacy: A Disciplinary Perspective

Abstract

What was the chemical revolution?This question lies at the heart of the historiography of eighteenth-century chemistry and animates the present paper.The orthodox response has placed Lavoisier at the center of an intellectual transformation, characterising him as both the author of the revolution and the founder of modern chemistry.For those who want to focus the credit on Lavoisier, the chemical revolution consists in his supplanting Stahl's phlogiston theory with the substantially correct oxygenic view of combustion.With this 'paradigm shift', the story goes, Lavoisier took a vital step forward in the development of modern chemical theory.The twin advantages of this view of the chemical revolution are philosophical and pedagogical, or, in other words, such a revolution is both easily thought and easily taught.Indeed, the most widely disseminated version of this intellectual revolution is that found in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a philosophical treatise written by a historian of science.Furthermore, Kuhn learned this version of the chemical revolution from James Bryant Conant whose most fully developed presentation on the subject was intended specifically to educate humanities students in the sciences.1 Here, I want to approach the question from a disciplinary perspective, focussing on the relationship between chemistry and pharmacy in order to see what new insights this might provide concerning the nature of the chemical revolution.Although many pharmacists feature prominently in the history of chemistry, pharmacy itself occupies at best a marginal position in this discipline and as a corollary has an even less significant presence in general histories of science.From the point of view of a twentieth-century scientist, this might seem natural; after all, the history of chemistry should be about chemistry, and pharmacy is not chemistry.Although I do not intend to argue the case fully here, I believe that this way of

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