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DASHED DREAMS. “For Auguste Laurent in particular, his work on morphine and other intoxicating alkaloids was a turning point. He entered it optimistic about the prospects of artificially producing morphine, nicotine, and other organic compounds. He left it convinced that any such laboratory creations would never be able to have the same effects on the human body.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

LIVING VS NON-LIVING. “My goal here is to reinsert the question of intoxication into the chemical investigations of the day as it served both to motivate the study of plant substances and acted as a model for thinking about how chemicals could affect the human body. As such, the question sat at the centre of important nineteenth-century debates on the development of synthetic chemicals and how to talk about the differences between living and non-living substances.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

CHEMICAL WORDS. “The new nomenclature left little space for speaking of the non-material aspects of substances. It took particular aim at the term “spirit,” with its connotations of immaterial transcendence. In its place, they proposed “alcohol,” reviving an Arabic term derived from Egyptian kohl which had referred generally to any chemical decoction.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

MANY A SLIP BETWIXT THE CUP AND THE LIP. “Laurent, who was known to taste his laboratory products every now and then to get the full range of sensory effect, did not mention ingesting them, but it serves as a reminder that these substances were of more than theoretical interest.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PURGING LANGUAGE. “When Antoine Lavoisier, Antoine-François Fourcroy, Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau and Claude Berthollet put forth their revolutionary new nomenclature in 1787, they were proposing not only a new system of naming, but one of classification as well, which exemplified a shift towards considering the fundamental, hidden principles of nature, rather than the effects that a substance produced. “Principles” now referred to the ultimate constituents of matter: hydrogen, oxygen, etc.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE FLOATING WORLD. “Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre have characterised the classification of chemical materials in this period as multidimensional, moving back and forth between the imperceptible (vital or inert) and perceptible (having or not having an effect upon the animal economy).” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

PERSISTENT VITALIST WORDS. “Naturalists trying to explain living processes like generation and growth drew on a language of active principles to explain how matter could come to organise itself. Apothecaries, herbalists, and chemists also used a language of principles when studying the virtues of plants, although it was not always clear what they meant.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn