What did nineteenth-century chemists know? This essay uses Emil Fischer’s classic study of the sugars in 1880s and 90s Germany to argue that chemists’ knowledge was not primarily vested in the theories of valence, structure, and stereochemistry that have been the subject of so much historical and philosophical analysis of chemistry in this period. Nor can chemistry be reduced to a merely manipulative exercise requiring little or no intellectual input. Examining what chemists themselves termed the “art of chemical experimentation” reveals chemical practice as inseparable from its cognitive component, and it explains how chemists integrated theory with experiment through reason.
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The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century
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Emil Fischer's Sample Collection
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The Construction of Analogy-Based Research Programs: The Lock-and-Key Analogy in 20th Century Biochemistry
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Remane, Horst;
Tansjö, Levi;
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Dilemmas of 19th-century Liberalism among German Academic Chemists: Shaping a National Science Policy from Hofmann to Fischer, 1865--1919
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Saltzman, Martin D.;
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The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s
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Theory versus Practice in German Chemistry: Erlenmeyer beyond the Flask
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Alexander von Humboldt;
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A Refuge for Inorganic Chemistry: Bunsen's Heidelberg Laboratory
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Essay Review
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(2011)
Visual Tools and the Quiet Chemical Revolution
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Stock, John T.;
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Translating Textbooks: Russian, German, and the Language of Chemistry
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