John E. Lesch (ed.): 'The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century

摘要

The early modern appropriations of Hippocrates lay bare the ideological us-es of history. The hermeneutical pliabil-ity of the Hippocratic figure made it possible for the legendary Greek physi-cian to become at once the champion of iatrophysics and the original iatrochem-ist. But the variegated gallery of the ear-ly modern Hippocrates reminds us once more that dealing with the medico-chemical debate in terms of a polariza-tion between vitalism and mechanism is unsatisfactory and misleading. In medi-cine, the adoption of the reassuring di-chotomy between Aristotelian natural-ism and mechanical philosophy is not so easy as in the physical sciences. Debus' introduction of the notion of 'chemical philosophy' was timely and it still is be-cause it aids the development of a more complex historical panorama. But pre-cisely because of this complexity, the category of chemical philosophy, not merely a heading for spagiric naturalism, turns out to be more varied than the Paracelso-Helmontian one: one has only to think of reluctant alchemists like Robert Boyle, of 'chymical Galenists' like George Castle and Francis Glisson, and of chemical iatrophysicists like Gio-vanni Alfonso Borelli and Marcello Malpighi. The principal merit of Debus' book lies precisely in relieving readers of their 'isms' and exposing them to the complexity of the early modern inter-play between medicine and chemistry, rising mechanical philosophies and still influential naturalisms. Guido Giglioni: Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, 38 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.; giglio29@hotmail.com The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century, ed. by JOHN E.LESCH, Kluwer Academic Pub-lisher, Dordrecht, 2000, viii + 472 pp., EUR 163.50 [ISBN 0-7923-6487-2].