This dissertation reassesses the chemical revolution that occurred in eighteenth-century France from the pharmacists' perspective. I use French pharmacy to place the event in historical context, understanding this revolution as constituted by more than simply a change in theory. The consolidation of a new scientific community of chemists, professing an importantly changed science of chemistry, is elucidated by examining the changing relationship between the communities of pharmacists and chemists across the eighteenth century. This entails an understanding of the chemical revolution (...) that takes into account social and institutional transformations as well as theoretical change, and hence incorporates the reforms brought about during and after the French Revolution. First, I examine the social rise of philosophical chemistry as a scientific pursuit increasingly independent of its practical applications, including pharmacy, and then relate this to the theoretical change brought about by Lavoisier and his oxygenic system of chemistry. Then, I consider the institutional reforms that placed Lavoisier's chemistry in French higher education. ;During the seventeenth century, chemistry was intimately entwined with pharmacy, and chemical manipulations were primarily intended to enhance the medicinal properties of a substance. An independent philosophical chemistry gained ground during the eighteenth century, and this development culminated in the work of Lavoisier who cast pharmacy out of his chemistry altogether. Fourcroy, one of Lavoisier's disciples, brought the new chemistry to the pharmacists in both his textbooks and his legislation. Under Napoleon, Fourcroy instituted a new system of education for pharmacists that placed a premium on formal scientific education. Fourcroy's successors, Vauquelin and Bouillon-Lagrange, taught the new chemistry to the elite pharmacists in the School of Pharmacy in Paris. These pharmacists also developed new analytical techniques that combined the aims of the new chemistry with traditional pharmaceutical extractive practices. The scientific pharmacist was created, who, although a respected member of the community of pharmacists, helped to define the new chemistry precisely by not being a true chemist. (shrink)

Meaning is use: Wittgenstein's well-known dictum is used as starting point for a language game on the English word 'instrument' in historical discourse. In this way it is possible to collect a set of words (and corresponding objects) so heterogeneous that the likening 'chemicals as instruments' does not seem misplaced. Looking for a better understanding, three classes of chemicals are considered: solvents, indicators, and reagents (just a couple!). The first two classes comprise chemicals, which create new experimental conditions (as the (...) classical air pump), or measure 'something' (as the classical thermometer). The third class is more peculiar to chemistry, in that reagents are typical chemical instruments for operating at the microscopic level. In addition, a second language-game is proposed, and it is stressed the deep epistemological difference between physics, which creates 'phenomena', and chemistry, which synthesizes substances. (shrink)