Chemistry and the universities in the seventeenth century.

T he appointment of de Renault as Professor of Chemistry at the University of Louvain in 1685 reflected more than a century of debate in European-learned circles (1). The followers of the Swiss-German reformer Paracelsus (1493-1541) had seen in chemistry and alchemy a new foundation for learning (2). Paracelsus had burned the Canon of Avicenna publically in 1527 at Basel and his followers rejected the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition of the universities. They saw little value in disputations or the study of logic and they sought an alternative to the four elements in Natural Philosophy and their attendant humors in medicine. They scorned the reading of the books of the ancient philosophers and saw truth primarily in the two books of Divine Revelation, the Bible and the Book of Creation or Nature.