ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Communicating embodied knowledge through text: Rose’s Handbuch der analytischen Chemie (1829)

• In Event: Dissent, Translation, and Appropriation in Chemical Textbooks, 1760-1881

English Abstract

As is well known, chemical experimentation has historically required a number of embodied skills such as the recognition of colors and smells that can only be perfected by doing laboratory work. Recent literature in history of chemistry has argued against the idea that such skills lost importance after the turn to quantification in chemistry at the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, the practice of mineral analysis in the nineteenth century still relied on embodied knowledge for the identification of chemical substances, because the presence of small quantities of impurities could lead to inconsistencies in qualitative properties that only an experienced analyst could recognize. But how could this kind of tacit, embodied knowledge be transmitted in printed handbooks? By focusing on the popular handbook of analytical chemistry written by the Berlin chemist Heinrich Rose, I will show how a step-by-step description including various kinds of verification procedures could enable beginners to have confidence that their analyses were successful..

Author

• Sarah Hijmans, Université Paris Cité - Laboratoire SPHERE