Georg Ernst Stahl

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This article is about Georg Stahl, the German chemist and physician. For Georg Stahl, the German artist, see Georg August Stahl.
Georg Ernst Stahl
University of Halle

Georg Ernst Stahl (22 October 1659

phlogiston were accepted as an explanation for chemical processes.[2]

Biography

Georg Ernst Stahl was born on October 22, 1659, at Anspach in

puerperal fever in 1696 and 1706. He also had a son Johnathan and a daughter who died in 1708.[2] He continued to work and publish following the death of both of his wives and eventually his children, but was often very cold to students and fell into deep depression[3] until his death in 1734 at the age of 74.[3]

Life and education

He was born in St. John's parish in Ansbach, Brandenburg on October 21, 1659. His father was Johann Lorentz Stahl.[4] He was raised in Pietism, which influenced his viewpoints on the world. His interests in chemistry were due to the influence a professor of medicine, Jacob Barner, and a chemist, Johann Kunckel von Löwenstjern.[5] In the late 1670s, Stahl moved to Saxe-Jena to study medicine at the University of Jena. Stahl's success at Jena earned him a M.D. around 1683 and then he went on to teach at the same university.

Teaching at the university gained him such a good reputation that in 1687 he was hired as the personal physician to Duke Johann Ernst of Sachsen-Weimar. In 1693, he joined his old college friend

Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and in charge of Berlin's Medical Board.[4]

Medicine

Stahl's focus was on the distinction between the living and nonliving. Although he did not support the views of iatro-mechanists, he believed that all non-living creatures are mechanical and so are living things to a certain degree.[4] His views were that nonliving things are stable throughout time and did not rapidly change. On the other hand, living things are subject to change and have a tendency to decompose, which led Stahl to work with fermentation.

Stahl professed an

circulation of blood, excretion and secretion
.

These beliefs were reflected in his views on medicine. He thought that medicine should deal with the body as a whole and its anima, rather than the specific parts of a body. Having knowledge on the specific mechanical parts of the body is not very useful.

Gottfried Leibniz, with whom he exchanged letters, later published in a book titled Negotium otiosum seu σκιαμαχία (1720).[7][8] Also, during the first part of the 18th century, Stahl's ideas on the non-physical part of the body were disregarded while his mechanistic ideas on the body were accepted in the works of Boerhaave and Hoffmann.[9]

Tonic motion

As a physician, Stahl worked with patients and focused on the soul, or anima, as well as blood circulation and tonic motion. Anima was a vital force that when working properly would allow the subject to be healthy; however, when malfunction of the anima occurred, so did illness. Tonic motion, to Stahl, involved the contracting and relaxing movements of the body tissue in order to serve the three main purposes. Tonic motion helped explain how animals produce heat and how fevers were caused. In Stahl's 1692 dissertation, De motu tonico vitali, Stahl explains his theory of tonic motion and how it is connected to blood flow within a subject, without citing William Harvey's blood flow and circulation theories, which lacked an explanation of irregular blood flow. Also within the dissertation, 'practitioners' are mentioned as users of his theory of tonic motion.

Stahl's theory of tonic motion was about the

amenorrhoea.[10]

Chemistry

The best of Stahl's work in chemistry was done while he was a professor at Halle. Just like medicine, he believed that chemistry could not be reduced to

mechanistic views. Although he believed in atoms, he did not believe that atomic theories were enough to describe the chemical processes that go on. He believed that atoms could not be isolated individually and that they join to form elements. He took an empirical approach when establishing his descriptions of chemistry.[5]

Stahl used the works of

fermentation, which in some respects resembles that supported by Justus von Liebig a century and half later. Although his theory was replaced, Stahl's theory of phlogiston is seen to be the transition between alchemy and chemistry.[5]

Stahl is credited for being among the first to describe carbon monoxide as noxious carbonarii halitus (carbonic vapors) in his 1697 publication Zymotechnia fundamentalis.[12]

Works

De lapide manati, 1710
  • Zymotechnia fundamentalis (1697)
  • De lumbricis terrestribus eorumque usu medico (in Latin). Halle: Christian Henckel. 1698.
  • Disquisitio de mechanismi et organismi diversitate (1706)
  • Paraenesis, ad aliena a medica doctrine arcendum (1706)
  • De vera diversitate corporis mixti et vivi (1706)
  • Theoria medica vera (1708)
  • De lapide manati (in Latin). Halle: Christian Henckel. 1710.
  • Georgii Ernesti Stahlii opusculum chymico-physico-medicum : seu schediasmatum, a pluribus annis variis occasionibus in publicum emissorum nunc quadantenus etiam auctorum et deficientibus passim exemplaribus in unum volumen iam collectorum, fasciculus publicae luci redditus / Praemißa praefationis loco authoris epistola ad Michaelem Alberti (1715) Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
  • Specimen Beccherianum (1718)[2]
  • Philosophical Principles of Universal Chemistry (1730), Peter Shaw, translator, from Open Library.
  • Experimenta, observationes, animadversiones, 300. numero, chymicae et physicae (in Latin). Berlin: Ambrosius Haude. 1731.
  • Materia medica : das ist: Zubereitung, Krafft und Würckung, derer sonderlich durch chymische Kunst erfundenen Artzneyen (1744), Vol. 1&2 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf
  • Fundamenta chymiae (in Latin). Vol. 3. Nürnberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter, Erben & Julius Arnold Engelbrecht, Witwe. 1747.
  • Fundamenta chymiae (in Latin). Vol. 2. Nürnberg: Wolfgang Moritz Endter, Erben & Julius Arnold Engelbrecht, Witwe. 1746.
  • The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy (2016), transl. and edited by F. Duchesneau and J. H. Smith, Yale UP (536 pp.)

References

  1. S2CID 41987182
    .
  2. ^
    Cengage Learning
  3. ^
    ISSN 0038-9056
    .
  4. ^ a b c d "Georg Ernst Stahl". Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 25 May 2013
  5. ^ a b c d Magill, Frank N. "Georg Ernst Stahl", Dictionary of World Biography. 1st ed. 1999. Print.
  6. ^ * Francesco Paolo de Ceglia: Hoffmann and Stahl. Documents and Reflections on the Dispute. in History of Universities 22/1 (2007): 98–140.
  7. ^ Smets, Alexis. The Controversy Between Leibniz and Stahl on the Theory of Chemistry Archived 2012-04-25 at the Wayback Machine, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on History of Chemistry
  8. ^ The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy (2016), transl. and edited by F. Duchesneau and J.H. Smith, Yale UP (536pp.)
  9. ^ Vartanian, Aram (2006) "Stahl, Georg Ernst (1660–1734)", Encyclopedia of Philosophy, editor Donald M. Borchert. 2nd ed. Vol. 9. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. 202–203. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 26 May 2013.
  10. S2CID 12488842
    . Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  11. ISBN 0-412-03641-X
    .
  12. doi:10.1016/j.niox.2021.04.001
    .
  • Hélène Metzger (1926) "La philosophie de la matière chez Stahl et ses disciples", Isis 8: 427–464.
  • Hélène Metzger (1930) Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave et la Doctrine Chemique
  • Lawrence M. Principe (2007) Chymists and Chymistry.

External links

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