Chemistry, Pharmacy and Revolution in France, 1777-1809

Jonathan Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754650447
• eBook ISBN: 9781317168065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book explores the history of pharmacy in France and its relationship to the discipline of chemistry as it emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It argues that an appreciation of the history of pharmacy is essential to a full understanding of the constitution of modern science, in particular the discipline of chemistry. As such, it provides a novel interpretation of the chemical revolution (c.1770-1789) that will, no doubt, generate much debate on the place of the chemical arts in this story, a question that has hitherto lacked sufficient scholarly reflection. Furthermore, the book situates this analysis within the broader context of the French Revolution, arguing that an intimate and direct link can be drawn between the political upheavals and our vision of the chemical revolution. The story of the chemical revolution has usually been told by focusing on the small group of French chemists who championed Lavoisier's oxygen theory, or else his opponents. Such a perspective emphasises competing theories and interpretations of critical experiments, but neglects the challenging issue of who could be understood as practising chemistry in the eighteenth century. In contrast, this study traces the tradition of pharmacy as a professional pursuit that relied on chemical techniques to prepare medicines, and shows how one of the central elements of the chemical revolution was the more or less conscious disassociation of the new chemistry from this ancient chemical art.

Chapter 1
Introduction:
Pharmacy and the Chemical Revolution

In some sense, pharmacy is as old as humanity itself. People have always made use of plant leaves, roots, and minerals to treat the diseases that have evolved along with them. Although modern scientific pharmacy, based on chemistry, toxicology, physiology, and a range of other sciences is a twentieth-century invention, it nevertheless started along this distinctive scientific course at least a century earlier. In France, the last decades of the eighteenth, and the first of the nineteenth proved crucial in setting the pace for modern European pharmacy. Traditionally referred to as apothecaries, the members of the Parisian guild experienced a profoundly significant event in 1777, as with the founding of the Collège de pharmacie they officially became pharmacists. This change in name was not, however, as decisive for the future of French pharmacy as subsequent developments in French chemistry and politics. The revolutions that would follow around the turn of the century would change the status of pharmacy, reform pharmaceutical education and provide a radically new horizon for pharmaceutical scientific ambition. The French Revolution was largely responsible for the crucial institutional changes that would transform a traditional guild structure into a state-run organization, but there was also a scientific revolution – the chemical revolution, associated with the name of Lavoisier – in the offing that would result in an equally dramatic change in how pharmacists perceived themselves and their art. This book covers these two revolutions, exploring the effects that they had on both pharmacy and chemistry in France.

The nature of the chemical revolution has become a key issue in the history of eighteenth-century chemistry, and this introduction will provide an opportunity not only to raise this central issue, but also to situate my own approach in relation to prior historical projects. Much of what this books aims to achieve will not be readily understandable to the non-specialist reader without reference to this introductory material, as I address issues that have built up over several decades of historical and philosophical work. Although relatively young as professional disciplines, both the history and the philosophy of science are more deeply immersed in preconceptions concerning their subject matter than many of their older academic neighbours, with the concept of 'revolution' acting as a vehicle for a great many of these prejudices. All the same, I intend this work to be accessible to anyone with a working knowledge of eighteenth-century French history, whether or not they are in the field of the history and philosophy of science. Stepping back, it becomes clear how an issue of unquestioned centrality for someone immersed in the field needs to be justified to those untouched by such concerns. Familiarity with disciplinary pre-occupations breeds a certain degree of complacency, and what were originally provisional explanatory conjectures can easily become congealed into inflexible positions and periodizations that constitute the almost invisible tools of the trade. Nevertheless, the revisionist needs to be equally careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; while on the one hand it is clear that what seems a compelling historical approach may have only acquired this status through constant repetition, on the other, such an approach might appear irrelevant simply because its relevance no longer needs to be made explicit.

I want to introduce the central issues addressed by this book by means of two preliminary questions. First, how can the history of pharmacy help our understanding of the development of chemistry in general and the episode of the chemical revolution in particular? Second, what is the relationship between the French and chemical revolutions? Concerning the first question, what I argue here is that examining the place of pharmacy gives the historian an illuminating perspective on the formation of chemistry as an independent science. The founding twentieth-century histories of chemistry have tended to take a well-delimited late-nineteenth-century discipline as their subject and from there to embark on a search for its origins.¹ This tactic brings with it not only the danger of projecting a contemporary scientific identity onto a markedly different socio-cultural context, but also raises the associated problem that any field not seen to have contributed directly to the development of modern chemistry is dismissed from consideration. Examining another field that has been (more or less intimately) allied to chemistry throughout its history, but one that is not identical with this science, allows us to present a more critical view of the identity of chemistry as a discipline.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers's history of chemistry has explicitly taken this very theme of identity as its organizing principle, tracing the changing self-conception of the discipline from the seventeenth into the twentieth century.² Instead of asking how chemists have conceived their own discipline, however, there is an alternative way of revealing disciplinary identity, and this involves looking at what areas chemists have excluded from their science. The changing features of what is taken to lie outside chemistry tell us much about what constitutes the science itself, just as the geographical definition of a country can be obtained from the borders it shares with all its neighbours, a sort of definition by exclusion. What is particularly interesting about pharmacy from this perspective is that at some time during the eighteenth century, it became the discipline from which chemists sought to distance themselves. Therefore, looking at the developing relationship between pharmacy and chemistry in this period tells us as much about the identity of the second as the first.

Furthermore, I will argue that a relational understanding of chemistry informed by this study of pharmacy can offer a more interesting interpretation of the chemical revolution, one that goes beyond seeing it as simply a change in theory. Here, I will take the opportunity to consider a few of the wide variety of positions that have already been adopted with respect to this event, and briefly review some of the debates that have resulted. These debates, for better or for worse, have defined the historical terrain of the chemical revolution as it lies at present.

As far as the second question is concerned – the relationship between the French and the chemical revolutions – it is beyond the scope of my work to review the historiography of the French Revolution, as this itself constitutes an extensive and particularly contentious area of historical scholarship. Instead, I will limit myself to suggesting some important points of contact between this central event in modern history and my treatment of the chemical revolution through pharmacy. Before I move on to these two questions, however, I want to start with some thoughts on the history of pharmacy, as it is a subject that generally falls outside the mainstream of the history of science, and it is worthwhile considering why this is the case. I will then briefly consider the role of disciplines in the history of science before passing on to the chemical and finally the French Revolution.

The history of pharmacy and the history of science

Although now widely considered an inadequate approach to understanding the history of science, the traditional tactic has been to recount a grand narrative that turns around the Scientific Revolution. This monumental event was classically understood as an intellectual revolution during which the great thinkers of the seventeenth century, relying on empirical observations, challenged medieval traditions, and finished by founding modern experimental science. At the heart of this story lie the replacement of the Ptolemaic Earth-centred universe with the Copernican sun-centred system, and the determination of the Newtonian laws of motion. With celestial and terrestrial mechanics very much to the fore, the temptation for historians of science who wanted to include chemistry in this vision of the Scientific Revolution was to search the science's past for the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and, of course, Newton. These architects of modern mechanics found their chemical equivalents partly in Robert Boyle, partly in John Dalton, but most fully in Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Just as the former group had thrown off the shackles of Aristotelian views of motion, and put a formalized universal mechanics in its place, the latter group rejected the Aristotelian understanding of matter, and replaced the four ancient elements with a substantially correct, experimentally based notion of chemical elements.³

Something that usually passes unnoticed is that the historical figures who have come to dominate the history of chemistry were quite untypical of practicing chemists between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth century. The majority of those engaged with chemistry were physicians or pharmacists, who had a direct professional interest in the medical uses of chemistry. Furthermore, the lack of interest these founding fathers showed in pharmacy (Dalton and Lavoisier in particular) is reflected in the writings of Lavoisier's biographers, such as Douglas McKie and Henry Guerlac, who became the most important historians of the chemical revolution in the post-war period.

In general, the scientists who have come to dominate the history of chemistry are those who have been seen to devise progressive chemical theories. Nevertheless, the search for novel theories as the only proper subject for the history of science has at least two detrimental side-effects. First, the focus on such scientists and their work obscures other scientists who, often due to the pressure of their professional commitments, put less energy into formulating these theoretical perspectives, but were nevertheless significant players in the development of a science.⁴ Second, tracing the filiation of theories ignores the importance of institutional and disciplinary shifts, and more importantly it leaves aside practical innovations particularly important in an experimentally based science like chemistry.

This preoccupation with theory has to a large extent carried over from general histories of science into the equivalent historical treatments of chemistry, the best known of which also tend to focus on the development of modern chemical theory, and thus have little to say about pharmacy as a professional tradition in chemistry.⁵ As I will argue in Chapter 3, the separation between chemistry and pharmacy, at least in seventeenth-century France, is an artificial one; moreover, it is one that distorts the historical perspective on the development of both chemistry as an independent discipline and pharmacy as a dependent one. Moreover, as Chapter 5 will make clear, failing to take these disciplinary shifts into account makes it difficult to understand the development of scientific pharmacy in the nineteenth century.

Disciplines in science

I have already suggested several times that I adopt a disciplinary approach to the chemical revolution, but without explaining what I mean by the word discipline. In general, it is a term that is widely used but rarely defined. A discipline, like the more commonly used sociological category of profession, means different things to different people and is easier to recognize than to define. Nevertheless, we can say that the word clearly carries the connotation of an area of specialization that has order and cohesion imposed on it, either from within or without. Furthermore, the association of 'disciplining' with the control and regulation of people's lives and bodies, coeval with the rise of modern industrial society is difficult to avoid, particularly following the widespread influence of Michel Foucault on social theory.' The parallels between political and scientific institutions suggest the use of political theory to understand the latter. Robert Kohler explicitly takes up this political angle when he offers the following general definition of a discipline:

Disciplines are political institutions that demarcate areas of academic territory, allocate the privileges and responsibilities of expertise, and structure claims on resources.⁷

Here, I will be pursuing this political approach, but from a different perspective. In line with Benedict Anderson's anthropological treatment of the phenomenon of nationalism, I want to emphasize the role that a discipline plays as a unit of identification. As such, it remains a multivalent term, in part pointing to membership in professional groups, and in part to an identity constructed around shared commitments and beliefs, at once less material and more egalitarian. This is how Anderson defines the nation in his influential Imagined Communities:

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.⁸

In the same spirit, I would like to think about a scientific discipline as an imagined scientific community, which is imagined as bounded and exclusively competent over its self-determined area of expertise. As Anderson stresses, the fact that a community is imagined does not mean that it is imaginary, and the division between pharmacy and chemistry is no less real for being conceived and constructed in a particular historical context. Thus, I want to argue, the disciplinary division took place and two separate disciplines came into being when chemists and pharmacists recognized themselves as distinct from one another, simultaneously defining the borders of their own community and those of the other.

Compared to those developing in the eighteenth century, more recent scientific disciplines are relatively easy to identify. Again, drawing on theories of nationalism, Mary Jo Nye in her treatment of nineteenth-century French chemistry has offered six elements for establishing a discipline: genealogy, a core literature, codified rituals, a physical homeland, recognition from the outside and a shared set of scientific values.⁹ Similarly, sociologists of science use key indicators to specify a particular discipline or sub discipline; schools of research, specialized journals and academic departments to name but three. In the present case, however, it is harder to pick out such clear markers for a particular discipline, because, at the end of the eighteenth century, discipline-building was not a refined art, and borders were neither as jealously guarded nor as clearly delimited as they are today. Taking the example of the journals that I will be examining in the present study, we can see this problem more clearly. While the Annales de chimie and the Bulletin de pharmacie provide clues to the diverging disciplinary identity of chemistry and pharmacy, there was, as we shall see, considerable overlap in their contents. Even if pharmacy was not the principal focus of the Annales, it continued to find a place in this journal even after the Bulletin had started to provide a specialized venue for scientific pharmacy. Furthermore, this was a period when there was no standard professional path for a scientist to take. Indeed, as I argue, one of the reasons that chemistry could establish itself independently of pharmacy was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Pharmacy and the Chemical Revolution
• 2 From Artisan to Scientist: The Creation and Rise of the French Pharmacist
• 3 From Pharmacy to 'Philosophical Chemistry': Glaser, Lemery, Venel, Macquer and Lavoisier
• 4 The New Chemistry: Fourcroy, Pharmacy and Revolution
• 5 The New Pharmacy: The First Generation of Chemical Pharmacists
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index