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Utility and Audience in Eighteenth-Century Chemistry: Case Studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

J. V. Golinski
J. V. Golinski
Affiliation:
Churchill College, Cambridge CB3 0DS, U.K.
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Extract

Historians of science are less inclined now than they were a few years ago to regard chemistry as having sprung full-grown from the mind of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Many of the contours of pre-Lavoisierian chemistry have recently been mapped, its Newtonian and Stahlian theoretical traditions have been delineated, and the degree of coherence enforced on the subject by its didactic role has been argued. In addition, the social prominence and cohesion achieved by chemists in various national contexts, such as France, Scotland and Germany, have been investigated. Karl Hufbauer (arguing specifically from the case of Germany) and Christoph Meinel have proposed that the cultural climate of the European Enlightenment provided the language and the social settings in which chemistry could be detached from its previous role as a service-art for medicine, and presented as a science with diverse practical applications.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 1 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1988

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135 Priestley, to Price, Richard, 27 09 1772Google Scholar, in Schofield, (ed.), op. cit. (90), pp. 108–109.Google Scholar A more complete collection of the correspondence surrounding Priestley's employment by Shelburne is given in Peach, W. Bernard and Thomas, D.O. (eds), The Correspondence of Richard Price: Vol. I, July 1748–March 1778, Durham, NC and Cardiff, 1983, pp. 124–128, 132–138, 145–148.Google Scholar

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138 The Works of Henry Lord Brougham: Vol. I, Lives of Philosophers of the Time of George III, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1872, p. 82.Google Scholar

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