Was alchemy a load of nonsense?

David Wootton seems to think so; I disagree.

Historian of science David Wootton has written a bracingly provocative review of my illustrated history of alchemy, which is available here to subscribers of The Spectator (who we have to presume do exist – indeed I sometimes get the copy of the magazine through my letterbox, meant for a neighbour in a similarly named road round the corner, who fortunately we know.)

You might be thinking that “bracingly provocative” here is me trying to be euphemistically positive instead of saying “Damn him, he slated it!” But that’s not at all the case. David has said some lovely things about the book, calling it “a treasure' and saying that 'the breathtaking images that almost overflow from the pages of this book. It’s a wonderful work.’ I’ll take that!

No, I’m referring to the fact that David’s perspective is one that he knows many other historians of science will disagree with, because it is strongly presentist. That’s the way David explicitly approaches the history of science, and he knows that it sets him at odds with many of his colleagues. I commented on this on my review of David’s The Invention of Science, which is a wonderful book when it’s not spoiling for a fight.

In this context what it means is that David suggests we shouldn’t be revising the old idea that alchemy was a fool’s quest populated by credulous dupes and charlatans, as many modern historians of science have done. We should be ready to say that yes, it really was a load of nonsense sustained only by trickery and fraud, along with a sack-load of mysticism and obscurantism.

Now, I agree that we shouldn’t let all alchemists off the hook. As I say in the book, there was surely plenty of deceit involved, and alchemy deserved some of the fun poked at it by the likes of Ben Jonson and Chaucer. What’s more, I point out that those few who continued to believe in alchemical transmutation even in the nineteenth century were indeed gullible types who had merely fooled themselves. So I’m not sure my book is as over-generous as David implies. Nor does it at any point suggest that science is “a collective fantasy, not a way of engaging with obdurate reality”. (I think David is confusing it there with Brexit, as well he might.)

Alchemy, he says, did not possess the “elementary features of a science”. This would be a fair point save for the inconvenient fact that the “elementary features of a science” were not established until the seventeenth century, after alchemy’s heyday. And that is the point. That is precisely how what was valuable in alchemy for natural philosophy, such as some of the experimental techniques and apparatus (indeed, its entire experimental outlook), the concept of the laboratory, and a wealth of chemical substances and processes, came separated from what was obstructive to modern science, such as secrecy and deliberately arcane language, during the transitional phase called chymistry.

To suggest that it was absurd or deluded to think in pre-modern times that one metal could be transformed into another is to take a ridiculously presentist view. There was no fundamental theoretical reason to suppose this could not be done. And in fact there was good empirical reason to believe it too, for all kinds of (al)chemical process could transform the appearance of metals, which it was perfectly reasonable to see as an indication of a deeper transmutation. If we’re going to say that Robert Boyle was an idiot for believing in alchemical transmutation, we might as well say that Aristotle was an idiot for not practising Newtonian physics, and Galileo was an idiot for being hopelessly wrong about comets and tides.

But as I stress strongly in the book, alchemy was not just about making gold. From the Stockholm papyrus to Jabir ibn Hayyan to Paracelsus, alchemists had always been engaging a wide range of chemical transformations, producing many of the substances useful in daily life. David says “alchemists were just very bad at it”. But compared with whom? Medieval metallurgy was state of the art, because where else could you find that? And that was considered a kind of alchemy. The same with the manufacturers of pigments and dyes. Most chemical medicines were pretty rubbish, because that was the state of medicine – not because it was being done using “alchemy” instead of a better method!

David asks that if there had been no alchemy, “would the course of history have been altered in the slightest degree?” I’m not sure what he means by this. It’s not really a meaningful counterfactual. Would medicine have been different without the humoral theory? Well yes, because physicians wouldn’t have thought in terms of humours. They would have had some other scheme. Would it have been better or worse? Take your pick; I’m not sure what that question can even mean. I’m interested in how ideas develop rather than, as someone (was it David’s nemesis Steven Shapin?) said, awarding medals for modernity, or wishing history were different.

I was happy to see David ask about homunculi. This is a fascinating side story in alchemy – not something that many of them made a big deal of, though Paracelsus wrote a fair bit about them and, as I say in the book, they feature in Goethe’s Faust. “Someone should write their history”, David says, and so I can recommend to him my much earlier book Unnatural.

So then, it’s a funny old review, but it serves as a great starting point for having these discussions about what alchemy was and was not, what is achieved and where it failed, and how we should think about it today as a strand in the history of ideas and cultures.