Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Audiences, 1789-1939 (review)

Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Audiences, 1789-1939. Edited by Anders Lundgren and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. Canton, Mass.: Watson, 2000. Pp. vii+465. $56.

I would consider this book indispensable to institutional libraries, worth owning by persons interested in the histories of science and technology, and even rewarding to the more general reader. It seems important to say this at the outset, for neither the topic nor the title are very exciting. Indeed, the editors' brief preface includes an apology for the "boring, dogmatic, conservative" reputation of the subject.

The crucial and reputedly boring question "what is a textbook?" may be intrinsically more interesting in this case than it would be in astronomy, physics, or biology, because of the questionable origins of chemistry. But this book does not deal with "early" chemistry. It begins after Lavoisier's reformation of the science in the late eighteenth century, and lays further groundwork in John Brooke's opening article, encapsulating what must have been a chaotic discussion of the question by the participants.

Of course, few would deny that a documentation of early textbooks would be instructive, and this is demonstrated by three (of eighteen) articles, dealing with early French, Spanish, Swedish, and Hungarian textbooks (German and English texts are dealt with less directly, and Italian textbooks seem regrettably missing).

At the opposite extreme from boredom are two articles, by Blondel-Mégrelis on the translations and editions of Berzelius' famous textbook and by Nathan M. Brookes on the equally famous textbook of Mendeleev. Both are well written and about as useful as any piece on the history of chemistry could be.

The book does not exhaust its subject. As noted in the several articles on national histories, the early textbooks were often inspired by training in medicine and pharmacy, an area that was to lead to textbooks of organic chemistry, which would seem to deserve special treatment. As to chemical technology, there is a chapter on books on the art of dyeing, by Agustí Nieto-Galan, and one on the textbooks for engineers at the E´cole Polytechnique, by coeditor Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. The topic is also dealt with in David Knight's chapter on English textbooks. But it too would seem to deserve independent treatment.

It can hardly be said that another specialty, physical chemistry, is similarly neglected. A chapter by Gunter Lind deals with the inclusion, around the turn of the nineteenth century, of chemistry in books on physics. And most up-to-date are the chapters by Mary Jo Nye on Linus Pauling, and by Gavroglu and Simoes on the role of textbooks in quantum chemistry. These pioneering essays are perhaps the most original and attractive in the book.

As recently as a generation ago, historians of chemistry were not very numerous even if specialists in alchemy were included. Communicating Chemistry, a product of a workshop held at Uppsala in 1996, suggests that this is no longer true. All but one of the authors are European, and the academic homes of the last two authors, Greece and Portugal, suggest the wide geographic distribution of the present generation.

Robert P. Multhauf

Dr. Multhauf, a former director of the Museum of History and Technology and the author of The Origins of Chemistry (1966), now resides in San Rafael, California.

Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

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