This symposium, co-organized by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Forum for the History of the Chemical Sciences, and Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, asks how chemical knowledge is shaped and put to work through interactions between conceptual, practical, economic and political change. Each panel addresses an exciting and developing area in the historiography of chemistry.

A. Practice: Recovering early alchemy and chemistry

Boundaries between different areas of chemical activity are often blurred in the pre-modern world. What was the relationship between theory and practice, or between the mechanical arts and natural philosophy? Did craft techniques become alchemical secrets, or vice versa? Can historians trace these links and recover lost practices? Matteo Martelli questions the decoupling of theory and practice in Graeco-Roman alchemy, Donna Bilak recovers the practical substratum of a famous allegorical treatise, and Cesare Pastorino investigates knowledge production in early modern mining enterprises. Commentary is provided by Jennifer Rampling.

B. Visualising: The matter of form in modern chemistry

Historians are increasingly concerned with the ‘hands on’ practices required to manipulate matter and formulate theories, and the various graphic tools that helped make conceptual connections between the evidence of the senses and the thinking routines of the mind. This panel examines how core visual tools like diagrams, mental models and tables were learned and used: aiming to identify larger themes relevant to techniques used to visualise matter in late modernity. Alan Rocke explains how mental imagery was used to construct nineteenth-century models of chemical compounds and reactions, Ann E. Robinson examines the pedagogical advantages and limitations presented by the graphic design of the periodic table, and Michel Morange focuses on the explanatory power of graphic structures imported from chemistry into molecular and cellular biology. David Knight provides commentary.

C. Exchange: Global histories of chemistry

This panel explores international exchanges of chemical knowledge, materials and practices by looking at the trials and travels of chemistry outside Western Europe, from the early Middle Ages to the Cold War. The circulation and translation of books, exchange of chemical substances, and attempts to replicate both practices and their meanings have played an important and often contested role, in fields ranging from pedagogy to drug development. Matthew Eddy provides commentary on papers by Gabriele Ferrario on the trade of lapis lazuli between medieval Egypt and China, Yoshiyuki Kikuchi on the international circulation of nineteenth-century chemical textbooks, and Anna Geltzer on collaborative drug development between the US and USSR.