Chemistry, Medicine, and Gold‐Making: Tycho Brahe, Helwig Dieterich, Otto Tachenius, and Johann Glauber

Abstract

17 th century chemistry was concerned largely with iatrochemistry (medicinal chemistry) and the transmutation of metals, especially with the purpose of making gold. Thus, Johann Rudolph Glauber made a living making and selling chemicals such as nitric acid and medicaments such as aurum potabile (drinkable gold), but he also believed in the transmutation or "improvement" of metals and the "augmentation" of gold, and he sold recipes for such processes. This perspective aims to provide a snapshot of the range of 17 th century chemistry by analysis of the efforts of four representatives to make drugs, chemicals, and gold. It will be concluded that early modern chemists were unable to break out from the conceptual doctrines imposed by Aristotle and Paracelsus, which made transmutation perfectly logical. No further scientific advance could be made until the idea that all things are composed of the same basic constituents was abandoned in favour of the atomic theory.

Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Historical Cryptology HistoCrypt 2020

“…Such a taxonomy would elucidate the varied motivations and methods in alchemical ciphering. Future work should also address the use of sympathetic inks in the context of alchemy, which has been noted (Macrakis and Lye, 2014;Macrakis, 2014;Wentrup, 2023),…”

The Transition from Alchemical to Modern Chemical Symbolism: from Bergman and Guiton de Morveau to Hassenfratz and Adet, Higgins, Richter, Dalton, and Berzelius

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“…However, they can also be applied to processes that do not obey Lavoisier's principle, the conservation of mass, such as the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold. 25,26 Here, we apply them to transmutations between pairs of molecules selected for their similarity according to various molecular ngerprints as similarity measures, an approach related to the recent development of transformer models for drug optimization. 27,28 We start by using DRFP, which encodes chemical reactions by storing the symmetric difference of two sets containing the circular molecular n-grams generated from the molecules of the molecular pair as a binary ngerprint, 21 to represent the chemical space of drug pairs as a TMAP (tree-map).…”

“…However, they can also be applied to processes that do not obey Lavoisier's principle, the conservation of mass, such as the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold. 25,26 Here, we apply them to transmutations between pairs of molecules selected for their similarity according to various molecular fingerprints as similarity measures, an approach related to the recent development of transformer models for drug optimization. 27,28…”