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13583 results in History of science and technology

Page 517 of 680

  • Priestley Memorial Lecture: A Practical Perspective on Joseph Priestley as a Pneumatic Chemist

  • Maurice Crosland
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 16 / Issue 3 / November 1983
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 223-238
    Print publication:
    November 1983

  • Two major problems in understanding Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) are that he wrote so much and over such a wide area. The nineteenth-century edition of his collected works fills 25 volumes—and that leaves out the science! In discussing a man like Priestley, therefore, one cannot hope in a single lecture to do justice to the wide range of his interests or even to summarise adequately his many contributions to science. Fortunately much of the scientific work is fairly well known, for example his discovery of many new gases or ‘airs’, as he preferred to call them. It might be appropriate, therefore, to try to put Priestley's pneumatic chemistry in a wider context and in particular to relate it to his career. Priestley was not only an important man of science. He was also an outspoken theologian, a literary figure and a family man, and all of these roles (and several others, including his political role on behalf of Dissenters) will have to be taken into consideration when the definitive biography is written.

  • Letter to the Editor

  • N. W. Pirie
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 16 / Issue 3 / November 1983
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 273-274
    Print publication:
    November 1983
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  • Helmont, Glisson, and the Doctrine of the Common Reservoir in the Seventeenth-Century Revolution in Physiology

  • Jeffrey Boss
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 16 / Issue 3 / November 1983
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    05 January 2009, pp. 261-272
    Print publication:
    November 1983

  • The change in the physiological conception of body fluid during the Seventeenth Century exemplifies the beginning of changes in chemical ideas away from humours as irreducible components of fluid systems towards water as the common solvent of an indefinitely large range of solutions. Against the Galenic humoral view of body fluids J.-B. van Helmont (1579–1644) postulated ‘latex’, a humour distributed through the body and common to several body fluids. The theory of latex explained experimental findings and provided a basis for Helmont's introduction of diuretics into the treatment of dropsy. Francis Glisson (1597–1677) adopted the theory of latex. In this paper it is shown that Helmont contradicted, in part at least, the distinctness of humours by a doctrine of a common reservoir from which various body fluids are drawn. It is further argued that, on the available evidence, Helmont is the originator of this idea of a common reservoir. Through hitherto unremarked and unpublished manuscript evidence, it is shown that Glisson, in adopting the theory of latex, and its therapeutic application, modifies and extends it. In the manuscripts Glisson expresses himself in the language of Helmontian philosophy. Given Glisson's known influence (in, for example, spreading Harvey's doctrine of the circulation), the question arises what part, if any, is attributable to him in the transmission of the doctrine of the common reservoir. From the point of view of experimental science, that doctrine makes a break with the past no less radical than does, say, that of the circulation. It appears that we have here yet another major contribution of Helmont to the scientific revolution with, through Glisson, a possible channel of transmission of this contribution.

Page 517 of 680