Abstracts Archive

Johan Baptista van Helmont’s famous willow tree experiment purported to demonstrate that “164 pounds of wood, bark, and roots had come up from water alone,” suggesting the preeminence of water as the foundation for botanical growth. This experiment has a long afterlife among agricultural refor...

The reception of the periodic system of elements in European countries has its specificity and differences. This paper will explore the first recognition of the periodic system of elements in Croatia after its publication (1869). Croatia was then a part of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalma...

Attempts to discover whether or not one material can be used in place of another run through the history of science from antiquity to the present. This paper gives an overview of twentieth century histories of substitute materials as a technoscientific-political project. Successful substitution typi...

The ability of vegetable and mineral substances to affect the human body has long stood poised between the desirable (food and drugs) and undesirable (poisons and toxins). The demand for the intoxicating virtues of drugs both therapeutic and recreational has been paralleled by the aversion to harmfu...

In the 1840s, the French chemist Auguste Laurent turned to the study of the “active principles” of alkaloids, which ranged from the medicinal properties of quinine and cinchonine, to the deadly poison of strychnine, to the intoxicating effects of morphine and nicotine. Laurent had recently retur...

In the mid-20th century, as GC-MS and other instrumental technologies facilitated an increasingly precise understanding of the molecular dimension of flavor alongside the development of formalized methodologies for measuring sensory experience, “flavor design” became a systematized aspect of con...

French nineteenth-century toxicology was a science made for the prosecution in criminal poisoning cases – a science conceived for and mostly made in the Cour d’Assises. The main purpose of toxicologists was the detection of small quantities of poisons in corpses in order to provide unquestionabl...

The historical narratives on the Nobel Prize in Chemistry granted to the Baltic-German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) hardly address the strong support Ostwald received nor the reasons presented in their nomination letters. Considering to be relevant presenting the reasons behind Ostwald’s pr...

In the twentieth century, the proliferation of synthetic chemicals prompted US and European governments to introduce regulatory regimes for the control of chemicals. It was especially consumers’ concerns about artificial food additives and synthetic pesticides that inspired environmentalism and pr...