I was delighted and startled to catch up on history that came out early this century on alchemy in the contact period.
Very good. I was delighted and startled to catch up on history that came out early this century on alchemy in the contact period.
Turns out the first school planned for the central Green in New Haven, my native city, was alchemical. The Puritan divines, who also doctored their congregations, were developing mineral-based materia medica to replace herbal simples.
Minerals more dosable. The school didn’t come to being but its legal foundation persists as the Hopkins school.
Which is philosemitic, come to think of it, as the divines were. Yale, in the same town, writes its motto in Hebrew, and my residential college there is named for a Puritan who studied Torah, Ezra Stiles.
Nearby, Rhode Island was conceived as an alchemical project. The “and Plantations” in its name refers to a proposed alchemical manufacturing enterprise.
Isaac Newton was involved. I enjoy telling people that he taught theology as a day job and stayed up all night doing alchemy. In fact turned himself into gold as Master of the Mint.
Gravitation was a passing interest and the calculus a bit of doodling.
And
Nothing pseudo about it. Quacks, sure, but they are everywhere.
Take it up with Isaac. I mean, sure, pseudo, if by that you include the humoral theory of the body that guided the foundation of the modern research hospital in Berlin and Paris and continued well into the 19C.
But I would go with “previous science.”
Dan
Daniel Edward Duffy, Ph.D. (Anthropology, Chapel Hill), graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College, serves as Janitor of the Viet Nam Literature Project.
These Janitorials draw from his diary at Facebook while at work on Viet Nam letters, another Substack.