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Clinical Investigation

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The recorded contention for the cozy connection among science and drug store is a solid one. As I have argued elsewhere, for long periods of modern history, chemistry was indistinguishable from pharmacy in the minds and vocabulary of many, at least in Europe. In the English-speaking world, the term chemist continues to be used even today to refer to pharmacists or their shops. This intimate association, and the desire it has spawned to differentiate the fields, reveals much about the nature of the two, particularly as they have evolved across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To clarify this remark, I propose to limn a history of modern chemistry although in such broad strokes that what follows is more caricature than history. The heritage from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was chemistry as a set of manipulations for transforming matter. The artisan-chemist took raw materials, combined them, or worked on them by means of instruments to arrive at the desired preparation. In general, such manipulations, as in pharmacy, were associated with purification, even exaltation, rendering the product a more potent therapy than the collection of raw materials, even if the chemical process was simply one of extraction. It should be borne in mind, however, that pharmacy, the preparation of medicaments, was one of a number of ‘chemical arts’ that used chemical manipulations to prepare materials for sale, normally through transformation by chemical reactions.    

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