Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750-1850.

This essay argues for understanding and investigating the history of production, not primarily as a quantifiable economic phenomenon, but as a history of practice that involves the human senses, culture, governance, and material engagement. The vehicle it uses to make its case focuses on a brief examination of production cycles involving salts in various parts of Eurasia during the century that runs from approximately 1750 to 1850. The essay's approach suggests a history of production in Eurasia that was both locally variegated and transregionally networked. It further involved the interaction between people and their sociomaterial environments, the latter understood as the evolving outcome of interplay between material elements and processes; culturally rooted tastes and values; and variously organized efforts to stimulate, manage, and pursue cycles of production and use. This essay further reflects on how contemporary commentators and present-day historians have (re)configured the geography of these practices in a way that emphasizes divergence between Europe and Asia. Part of this reflection involves looking at what can happen when the historical investigation of production is based on economic analysis. So too does it involve thinking about the potential pitfalls of framing comparative histories.

The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth Century English Natural History.

Before Newton's seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemliah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object's hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.

[From photography to chrysotherapy: Fordos and Gelis salt]. / De la photographie a la chrysotherapie: le sel de Fordos et Gelis.

In 1840, the French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau (1819-1896) proposed an auric chloride and sodium thiosulfate-based reagent to fix daguerreotypes. In 1843, two French pharmacists, Mathurin-Joseph Fordos (1816-1878) and Amedee Gelis (1815-1882), isolated its main ingredient in crystalline form and analysed it as a sodium aurothiosulfate. They recommended the use of an aqueous solution of this product to fix photographic negatives. In this way, the deterioration by sulfuration that negatives underwent with Fizeau's solution could be avoided. Fordos and Gelis salt came back in the news in 1924 when Prof. Holger Christian Mollgaard (1885-1973) from Copenhagen suggested it under the term Sanocrysine for use in tuberculosis. The enthusiasm which followed the initial trials led to its being adopted by many countries. In France, Danish Sanocrysine was commercialised by the Bordeaux pharmacist Jean Dedieu (1892-1968) while sodium aurothiosulfate was marketed as Thiocrysine by Usines du Rhone in Lyon, and as Chrysalbine by Maison Poulenc Freres in Paris. Chrysalbine became Crisalbine when the two companies merged to become Societe parisienne d'expansion chimique (Specia). However, inadequate results, the toxicity of auric derivatives and, especially from 1945 on, the advent of really effective tuberculostatic agents progressively led to the decline and abandonment of Fordos and Gelis salt in the treatment of tuberculosis.

[Supply of medicines for the Dutch whaling and salt trade in de seventeenth century]. / Geneesmiddelen voor de traan en zouthandel in de 17de eeuw.

During the seventeenth century the small Dutch nation with a population of no more than 1.5 million people played a prominent role in the whale oil and salt trade. Two reports discovered in the Archives in The Hague and Delft are dealing with the provision of medical and pharmaceutical services during their extensive maritime commerce. Surgeon chests destinated for whaling explicitly contained medicines to treat scurvy, respiratory illnessses and musculoskeletal diseases. The workers exploiting the saltpans in Arguin, near the northwestern coast of Afrika, were in need for drugs to cure gastrointestinal complaints and inflammatory conditions of the mouth.

Operational practice and the emergence of modern chemical concepts.

Both "early chemistry" and "modern concepts" are imprecise. The earliest references to the materials involved in metallurgy, painting, ceramics, and the like, reveal an awareness that one group of materials were called "salts" because of their similarities. I consider this a chemical "concept." Seeking another example I claim to have found it is the so-called "mineral acids." The evidence for the existence of this concept is cumulative during the period just before the emergence of "modern chemistry," of which it may be considered a cause. That evidence is particularly found in the literature of pharmacy and of medicine, both of which belong to the practical arts.