| Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) is widely recognized among historians of science and medicine as the most prolific medical and chemical professor of the Eighteenth Century. Despite the hundreds of students who attended his lectures at the University of Leiden, few historians have characterized him as an innovator who significantly shaped the fields in which he worked. One reason for this view is that Boerhaave devoted his career to the pedagogical reform of university medicine, and not to what modern scientific practitioners would call “research.” I contend that this interpretation skews the significance of Boerhaave's work, because it disregards the disciplining-shaping power of pedagogy and imposes a sharp distinction between teaching and knowledge-making that simply did not exist in the Early Modern world.; By examining his pedagogical work in chemistry, culminating in his innovative textbook, Elementa Chemiae (1732), I show that Boerhaave created a chemistry suitable for the university medical faculty by giving it a proper philosophical grounding. He incorporated parts of the extant “chymistry,” which included a melange of craft practices, alchemy, and natural philosophy, into his new field, but he arranged this material according to a pedagogical “method” (i.e., order). In structuring his new chemistry, Boerhaave defined the field, established its intellectual and practical boundaries, initiated standards of practice, and provided a theoretical perspective. He also tested processes in his laboratory that later became paradigmatic demonstrations for the philosophical points in his lectures. Ultimately, Boerhaave transformed chemistry into a form of experimental natural philosophy, focusing on the development and analysis of theoretical claims, rather than the propagation of chemical recipes.; Ultimately, my account of Boerhaave's work in chemistry suggests that the pedagogical approach and structure of Boerhaave's Elementa Chemiae became the foundation for academic chemistry in the Eighteenth Century. More generally, this study demonstrates the conflation of pedagogy and philosophy among scientific practitioners in Early Modern Europe. The act of creating a course in chemistry, medicine, or “physics” and then presenting it to an audience was essentially the way one practiced natural philosophy. |
