Matters of Exchange (original) (raw)
2017, Yale University Press eBooks
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Matters of Exchange explores the interplay among commerce, medicine, and science during the Dutch Golden Age, emphasizing how exchange networks facilitated knowledge transfer and the advancement of scientific thought. The work examines the historical context of 17th-century Netherlands, focusing on the critical role that trade and medicine played in shaping scientific developments of the era.
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Isis, 2018
This essay argues that we should consider perceptions of and associations with alchemical language and practices in academic and artisanal as well as popular culture in the Netherlands in order to gain a better understanding of the supposed transformation of alchemy into chemistry in this region. A fresh view on the sites of Dutch chemistry around 1700 is provided, demonstrating that the unique sociopolitical and geological characteristics of the Low Countries meant that the process of the "disappearance" of alchemy was distinctly different from that in the neighboring German lands. Finally, the essay shows that, as Lawrence M. Principe has previously suggested, the rhetoric with which Herman Boerhaave and other Dutch academics rejected the "excesses of chemistry" was less empirically than morally and socially motivated. L awrence M. Principe has argued that the search for metallic transmutation, or chrysopoeia, was ordinarily viewed as synonymous with or a subset of chemistry in the late seventeenth century but was increasingly called "alchemy" in the early eighteenth century and banned fairly quickly from respectable chemistry during that period, although many established chemists continued to pursue it privately at least until the 1760s. 1 By the 1740s chrysopoeia was in most places considered a relic of the past. Although it is not unlikely that academics felt a need to denounce alchemy in order to establish chemistry as a respectable academic discipline, according to Principe there are no historical records that support the notion that the rapid decline of a centuries-old Marieke M. A. Hendriksen is a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC Artechne Project at Utrecht University. She is the author of Elegant Anatomy: The Eighteenth-Century Leiden Anatomical Collections (Brill, 2015). She is writing a book on the transmission of knowledge and skills between different professional groups in anatomical model making in the long eighteenth century.
EXCERPTA ARCHAEOLOGICA LEIDENSIA II ANALECTA PRAEHISTORICA LEIDENSIA
Excavation of an old quarter of the Dutch town Maastricht offered the opportunity to analyze social differences in the botanical contents of cesspits. The study concerns households of high, middle, and lower class during the period 1875-1930. Only the quality of the flour and the presence of dried flowers seem indicative of status. The absence of other markers of social differentiation can possibly be attributed to the disappearance of diversity in food habits due to the influence of food educationalists at the end of the 19th century.
1713 was a sad year for Hendrickje Dircksz. Her husband, the Leiden anatomy professor Govard Bidloo died on April 20. A few months later, she put his library and anatomical museum on auction. Books were sold on October 23, 24 and 25 and brought in almost three thousand guilders. The museum was sold on the afternoon of the 25 th . It contained 131 anatomical preparations, i.e. human organs preserved by the injection of wax, which were valued at just over 177 guilders, a small sum of money. Only four years later, the Amsterdam professor Frederik Ruysch cashed in over thirty thousand guilders when the Russian czar purchased his anatomical cabinet. For this money, Ruysch could have afforded five or six elegant houses on one of the more fashionable canals of Amsterdam, and the deal was almost equivalent to winning the lottery. When Ruysch's daughter won the jackpot in 1720, she received seventy-five thousand guilders for her ticket. Bidloo's family, on the other hand, would scarcely have managed to survive until the following summer on 177 guilders. While the contrast between these two sales appears quite shocking, it would not have surprised contemporaries. The two anatomists were known to despise each other, and spent the better half of the 1690s on a bitter pamphlet war over the role of preparations in anatomical research. Their respective positions foreshadowed the divergence of the sales prices. Ruysch claimed that his anatomical preparations offered a faithful representation of the body. Bidloo countered that the specimens offered deceptive evidence, and anatomical atlases were better equipped to visualize anatomical structures.
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