#chymistry

Women and Chymistry

Want to get more women involved in STEM fields? So did Marie Meurdrac, a seventeenth century chymist, proto-feminist, and author of  La chymie charitable et facile : en faveur des dames (1680, located in the UNC HSL Special Collections).  Written by a woman, dedicated to a female patron, and intent on making chymistry accessible to women, M. Meurdrac’s work is essential for anyone studying women in the history of science.

Summer has officially started in Chapel Hill, and UNC HSL’s Graduate Research Assistant, Ashley, is writing for the Tumblr again! That means more quests to find obscure (and sometimes creepy) items in our collections, more botanical remedies, and (of course) even more alchemy!

To start off the summer, today we’re posting about the different tables of alchemical symbols you can find in our special collections (both here and at @wilsonlibunc )! Tables of chymical characters were typically inserted into chymistry books in the 17th century.  Early practitioners of the art of chymistry (a hybrid of alchemy and chemistry) would use these tables to decode alchemical symbols they found in handwritten manuscripts.

In order to demystify the codes of the past, printers needed to figure out a way to print these rather weird special characters.  While some texts (like the Le Fevre) used intaglio printing methods to create these tables, others (like the Lemery text) used moveable type--making hundreds of tiny symbols for each table! (Personally I’m rather partial to the moveable type versions, as I like to imagine typemakers creating a bunch of tiny metal skulls and crescent moons).

Regardless of printing method used, all of these 17th century tables give the reader an interesting glimpse into the complex symbology of alchemy.  So if you need to decode old alchemical manuscripts any time soon (or if you want to try your hand at writing messages in alchemical symbols), come check out these cool books in UNC HSL and Wilson Library!

Image 1: Nicolas Lemery. A Course of Chymistry. 1698. Health Sciences Library Special Collections. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Secrets of the Art: Alchemy and Chymistry in Early Modern Europe

Think the Philosopher’s Stone was the only thing alchemists cared about?  Think again!  Knowledge of chymistry (an early hybrid of alchemy and chemistry) was a valuable skill for 17th century medical practitioners.  By chymically transforming various compounds, physicians sought to transform diseases and impurities in the human body.  Through alchemical techniques, these chymists hoped to develop medicines that were much stronger than the cures of their predecessors.

Chymists worked not only with botanicals, but also with minerals, animal compounds, and even human skulls! (Fun fact: chymists used moss from dead men’s skulls as an ingredient in “weapon salve”--a medicine that one applied to the weapon that made the wound, and not the wound itself!)

Bringing this back.

!! that would be awesome

Plausible.

It’s not clear how Newton’s papers were found after his death, but in July 1936, Sotheby’s put up a metal chest full of Newton’s more obscure papers up for auction. Three hundred and twenty-nine lots of those papers were in this auction, but I have no idea how many pages were in each lot, so I can’t verify the number here for sure.

Most of the papers were deemed unpublishable in Newton’s day since many of them had to do with what we’d consider the occult: astrology, chronology, Biblical studies and alchemy. The alchemy papers themselves comprised about a third of the lots.

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