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(Frankfurt, 1598), which incorporated chapters discussion. Translating ancient Greek medical not in Dioscorides’ Greek text, adding the notha terms is perilous: for example, is podagra exactly (synonym-lists) that had descended into the our gout?;isasthma our asthma? The list is Renaissance alongside the text itself. Goodyer extensive and, for this reason, medical quite frequently replicated the Latin researchers are still advised to consult the Greek transliterations of Greek names for plants, terms’ lexical ranges. Particularly difficult are thereby increasing confusion, in striking contrast Greek terms for dermal lesions. (Beck should be to Dioscorides’ careful precision. Now Lily excused from the publisher’s unfortunate Beck, a professional classicist who also knows spelling of ‘‘Anarzarbus’’ on the cover.) her botany, has rendered Dioscorides accessible Lily Beck employed Max Wellmann’s critical to anyone who reads good English. John text in three volumes published between 1906 Scarborough’s introduction gathers the few and 1914 (reprinted 1958). Having seen most of biographical data on the talented author of the De the Greek manuscripts, I am of the opinion that, materia medica, and is a valuable guide to despite Wellmann’s erudite scholarship, a new contents, the history of the text, and Dioscorides’ Greek text should be made, but even after it is, sources of information. Beck will survive as the standard English Dioscorides’ writing style employs a paucity translation. Before publication, Beck asked me to of words and is similar to modern science articles. read her translation but, alas, I was unable to do so He tells his readers to disregard style and pay at the time and instead gave her a very small attention to the content. He explains that, for each modicum of advice. Beck’s translation embodies plant, he first read what the previous authorities sensitivity to Dioscorides’ meaning that even a had reported (often citing by name), then he classicist, who is reading the Greek, would want travelled widely in a ‘‘military-like life’’, to consult. So, now the medical historians can observing the plants in their habitats, talking with toast Beck’s work with a cup of herbal tea. the people about their experiences with drugs, and finally ‘‘testing’’ their actions himself. Only John M Riddle then did he have a fact he trusted, which could be North Carolina State University related. Beck observes in her introduction that the text is mostly devoid of what we call magic and Bruce T Moran, Distilling knowledge: superstition. Where there were uses that he would alchemy, chemistry, and the scientific revolution, not endorse, he prefaced them with words to New Histories of Science, Technology, and distance himself, such as, ‘‘it is reported’’, ‘‘they Medicine, Cambridge, MA, and London, say’’, and ‘‘it seems’’. Even so, occasionally Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 210, $24.95, Dioscorides slipped, such as with the plant scilla: £16.95 (hardback 0-674-01495-2). ‘‘ward[s] off evil when hung whole on front doors’’. Beck’s point withstanding, Dioscorides’ Moran begins this short, introductory book by keen talents were remarkable in observing the asking how alchemy, a seemingly disordered and effect of natural drugs on humans (and irrational pseudo-science, fits into a discussion of occasionally animals). In our time when the scientific revolution. His answer, like that alternative medicine is receiving renewed also offered elsewhere by William Newman and interest, one should keep in mind that natural Lawrence Principe, is that alchemy is—or rather product drugs are the result of human was—chemistry. Moran points out that sixteenth- experiences, mostly intelligent ones. and seventeenth-century alchemy, ‘‘although Each chapter begins with the Greek term in the motivated by assumptions about nature not Greek alphabet and, in the case of plants, shared by many today, still occasioned an intense followed by the binominal scientific name with practical involvement with minerals, metals, the English term. For identifications, Beck used and the making of medicines’’ (p. 2). Moran, the standard authorities; when authorities however, is less interested in the precise nature of disagree, she has notes, although modest in this practical involvement than in what its

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development and the changing contemporary is clear to see how alchemy possessed a discourse around it tell us about ‘‘the creation of methodology and purpose aligned to what is new learning’’ during this crucial historical considered the emergent modern scientific period. method of observation and experimentation. Moran’s account of this process begins with Its emergence as modern pharmacy, however, the tradition of what he calls ‘‘distillation was only part of the process by which alchemy alchemy’’,and it is this tradition that leads us in to gradually shed its skin and became something what is so relevant and important about early else. It also had to lose its (more infamous) modern ‘‘chemistry’’ for the history of medicine. association with transmutation—the process by In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth which it was believed that with this same elixir, centuries, John of Rupescissa, Raymond Lull and medicine or Philosophers’ Stone, base metals Roger Bacon all sought ‘‘a super-medicine, an could be turned into silver and gold. The elixir or aqua vitae that could purify physical medieval Church’s condemnation that ‘‘They bodies of their impurities, rid the human body of promise that which they do not produce’’haunted disease, and prolong life’’ (p. 11). All looked alchemists down the centuries: theirs was a back to the works of the Arabic writer, Jabir ibn suspicious, specious, and even perhaps heretical, Hayyan. Through distillation, Geber (as his name claim to knowledge. was Latinized) believed it would be possible to Thus Moran suggests that ‘‘if we are looking separate the essential parts of nature into the for a place where ‘alchemy’ was redefined and purest substance of all. This ultimate substance discarded in favour of ‘chemistry’’’ we could do became known as the quintessence or fifth worse than look to the French royal apothecary essence, and, using (and sometimes discovering Nicholas Lemery’s Course of chemistry (1675) along the way) oils, alcohol, salts, minerals, (p. 119). For Lemery was amongst those metals, acids, alkalis and the dividing effects of philosophers who, like Descartes, sought a clean fire, it was in the rarefied, secluded space of the break with previous interpretations of nature: laboratory that alchemists sought the inner ‘‘Lemery cast alchemists into the ranks of frauds essence of all nature. and impostors who were (all of them) solely This search, along with the processes and concerned with making gold. Redefining substances that might facilitate it, preoccupied alchemy in this way allowed chemistry to shed the minds of many important Renaissance and any connection to dubious alchemical practices. early modern philosophers, from Paracelsus in Chemistry was laundered so as to have an the mid-sixteenth century to Boyle and Newton untraceable history. By virtue of its shared in the late seventeenth. As Moran points out, this methods and types of inquiry, it claimed to be a pursuit was not isolated from other intellectual distinct and unprecedented form of knowledge practices. Alchemy could and did join forces with possessing its own rational mode of discovery. mathematics, medicine and other experimental The new perception of chemical experience sciences, with the lofty career of Robert Boyle excised perceived alchemical lies and deceits and being an obvious case in point. Thus when Jean turned what had been practical alchemical Beguin came to define alchemy—or as he also wisdom into new chemical facts’’ (p. 119). called it, chemistry—in 1669, it was to him ‘‘the Moran writes of sometimes complex art of dissolving natural mixed bodies, and of philosophical ideas with an easy, approachable coagulating the same when dissolved, and of style. As well as offering an interesting account reducing them into salubrious, safe, and grateful of alchemy and chemistry in early modern medicaments’’ (p. 113). For his contemporary, Europe, he presents a good exercise in scholarly Christofle Glaser, apothecaries ‘‘relied on historiography that will be of value to many chemistry to teach them how to make students new to this subject. compositions, how to preserve the virtues of their ingredients, and how to separate the pure from the David Boyd Haycock, impure parts of mixtures’’(p. 118). Put like this, it London School of Economics

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