Bücher der Reihe Perspectives on the History of Chemistry

This book tells the story of how chemists, physicians, and surgeons attempted to end the problem of urinary stones. From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, chemists wanted to understand why the body formed urinary, pancreatic, and other bodily stones. Chemical analysis was an exciting new means of understanding these stones and researchers hoped of possibly preventing their formation entirely. Physicians and surgeons also hoped that, with improved chemical analysis, they would eventually identify substances that would reduce the size of stones, leading to their easier removal from the body. Urinary stones and other stones of the body caused the boundaries of surgery, chemistry, and medicine to blur. The problem of the stone was transformational and spurred collaboration between chemistry and medicine. Some radical physicians in America and Britain combined this nascent medical advancement with older disciplines, like humoral theory. Chemists, surgeons, and physicians in Charleston, Philadelphia, and London focused on the stones of the body. Chemical societies and museums also involved themselves in the problem of the stone. Meanwhile, institutions in Charleston, Philadelphia, and London served as repositories of specimens for testing and study as previously disparate practitioners and disciplines worked toward the comprehensive knowledge that could, perhaps, end suffering from stones. The primary audience of this book is historically-minded chemists, surgeons, physicians, and museum professionals.

This book comprises seventeen independent essays on little remembered chemists whose contributions have had significant impact on chemistry and society. Among these chemists, readers will find names such as Alexander Borodin and Sir William Crookes, whose fame is known but not their chemistry. In the remaining fifteen essays readers will discover about less well-known chemists such as Frederick Accum, John Mercer and Ellen Swallow Richards. Each essay is complete in itself with selection made without regard to the area of chemistry involved, and they appear alphabetically by the family name of individual.This collection of essays consists of selections from the series originally published quarterly as Some Unremembered Chemists in the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry in-house journal, Chemistry in New Zealand (2013-2018). They are abstracted, edited and abbreviated slightly, and appear with the permission of the copyright holder.