Aux origins de la chimie organique: Méthodes et pratiques des pharmaciens et des chimistes (1785–1835) (review)

Sacha Tomic has written a clear and incisive account of the origins of organic chemistry, with two principal goals: first, to present the transfer of knowledge between pharmacists and chemists by examining their approach to the analysis of animal and vegetable substances, and second, to show how pharmaceutical chemistry and the chemistry pursued by chemists came together to constitute a new science of organic chemistry. He writes with the tactile sense of one trained as a laboratory chemist. Throughout this book, he considers not only theory, but also practical matters, including the development of chemical apparatus, and the competing claims of analysis in the wet way, i.e. using solvents, and in the dry way, i.e. using fire and distillation.

Existing histories of chemistry trace the story of the origins of organic chemistry from the researches of Lavoisier and his supporters in the last quarter of the eighteenth century through the work of J. J. Berzelius, J.-B.-A. Dumas, Justus Liebig, Auguste Laurent, and Charles Gerhardt—a story where pharmacists are little in evidence, and where chemical theory generally dominates. There have been welcome enrichments to this standard story, including Jonathan Simon’s work on the role of pharmacy in the chemical revolution, and Melvyn Usselman and Alan Rocke’s examination of chemical practice in Liebig’s analytical researches. The late Frederic Lawrence Holmes, with his superb studies of investigative pathways, is Tomic’s principal model, fully acknowledged, along with Simon, and with Ursula Klein’s account of the epistemology of experiment. But no one before Tomic has told the story in a way that makes instruments and apparatus, the purity of reagents, and the analysis of the alkaloids the keys to an understanding of a new discipline.

Chapter 1 deals with the instruments of analysis in a chemical laboratory, with instruments defined broadly as tools, reactants, and solvents. Chemists and pharmacists are both presented as craftsmen who produce the objects of their research and whose skill with their hands takes a lifetime to perfect. Tomic gives us a remarkably comprehensive account of chemical laboratories throughout this period.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the new principles of immediate analysis, by which compounds are divided into relatively easily separable constituents (in contrast with ultimate or elemental analysis). The practical difficulties of analyzing vegetable and animal substances are well handled, as is the mix of pressures shaping technical operations in the laboratory. The entry of alkaloids into academic chemistry and the medical pharmacopoeias intensified work on poisons, as well as investigations into the quality or purity of medicines. The very idea of the purity of a chemical substance was refined in the course of solvent extraction. Since the synthesis of vegetable and animal substances was often out of reach, organic analysis, guided by chemical and botanical analogies, led to new taxonomies of these substances.

Chapter 3 presents the isolation of alkaloids as the triumph of the pharmacists in their exploration of the materia medica. Opium, cinchonine, and morphine were at first the most widely analyzed alkaloids, of major medical importance. Although many of the pioneers of quantitative organic analysis were French, the search for new alkaloids, and their analysis, was a more broadly European quest, principally involving Portugal, France, Scotland, and the German states. Between 1817 and 1835, about twenty alkaloids were isolated and analyzed, contributing to a classification under construction, and one involving numerous errors.

Chapter 4 describes the birth of the discipline of organic chemistry, where chemists and pharmacists converged on a common research frontier. The convergence was not entirely cooperative: chemists accused pharmacists of a lack of theoretical rigor, and pharmacists fought back by characterizing elementary analysis as the preserve of an elite, not useful in practice. The theory of radicals, when applied to organic chemistry, contributed to a classification that could be related to immediate principles, useful to both...