What's in the flask?

The gazed-at flask (clockwise from left): Avicenna's doctor; a modern chemist; Margaret Thatcher; the ClipArt view. Credit: MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS/ CLIPART.COM/HULTON-DEUTSCH/CORBIS

What are these scientists all looking at? The archetypal image of the chemist, ubiquitous in stock photographic images today, and even in clip-art databases, depicts a lab-coated figure gazing at a flask of liquid held aloft. The inclusion of the picture in the bottom right will be understood by British readers, who may recognize the features of a woman who went on to become the country's prime minister.

But this is not what real chemists spend their time doing. So where does the pose come from? As Joachim Schummer and Tami Spector pointed out at a recent conference in Paris on the public image of chemistry, the answer lies in the image in the top left. This appeared in a book dating from 1283, the Latin translation of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, and shows not a chemist but a doctor. The flask contains not a solution synthesized by alchemy but a sample of a patient's urine — diagnoses were typically made by uroscopy, the practice of inspecting the urine for colour, clarity and other qualities.

When Paracelsus introduced chemistry into medicine (so-called iatrochemistry) in the early seventeenth century, this image of the gazed-at flask transferred itself from medicine to ‘chymistry’, and subsequently became so much a part of the subject's visual language that it is alive and well today.

→ http://www.hyle.org/service/chmc2004/