Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) was one of the most prolific teachers of chemistry and medicine in the earthly Eighteenth Century; his student Albrecht von Haller called him the “<i>communis Europae praeceptor</i>.”  One of Boerhaave’s pedagogical innovations in his chemistry course was his use of demonstration-experiments to build theoretical claims.  His use of these experiments moved beyond the traditional demonstrations of how to make medicaments and other chemical products that had been a staple of chemistry textbooks for more than a century.   Rather, he intended his demonstrations to reveal latent characteristics and relationships between substances, about which he could theorize to his students.  To do this, he worked out his demonstrations ahead of time, often incorporating novel instruments, such as thermometers, air pumps, and other custom apparatus, previously little used in chemistry.  This paper examines a handful of Boerhaave’s demonstrations in detail, by discussing their origins, how he worked them out, and how they persisted in the chemical literature of the 18<sup>th</sup> century, even as the theoretical interpretations of the experiments were altered or dismissed by later chemists.

Herman Boerhaave and the use of demonstration-experiments in chemistry courses

251st National Meeting (2016)

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