Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren

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Portrait of Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren

Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren (born May 1, 1760 in Bernburg ; † November 26, 1798 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German chemist, physicist and doctor.

At the end of the 18th century he wrote the well-read three-volume Systematic Handbook of Total Chemistry (1787 to 1790), on which Martin Heinrich Klaproth also worked after Gren's death . In 1794 he began to publish the Journal of Physics, continued as Annalen der Physik by Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert . He was one of the last and most energetic proponents of the phlogiston doctrine .

Live and act

His parents were the hat maker Johan Magnus Gren (1715–1775) and Dorothea Elisabeth, b. Sieber. He was actually intended to study theology, but after the death of his father had to begin an apprenticeship with pharmacist FC Schulze in the Green Pharmacy in Bernburg . In 1779 he was given a pharmacy in Offenbach am Main . The following year he went to Wilhelm Bernhard Trommsdorff in Erfurt . On his advice, he began studying medicine in Helmstedt in 1782 . Lorenz von Crell granted him free accommodation, arranged for him a scholarship and recommended him in 1783 as an assistant to Wenceslaus Johann Gustav Karsten in Halle. Even as a student of medicine, he gave lectures in chemistry. 1786 he became a Doctor of Medicine doctorate . In his dissertation Dissertatio inauguralis physica-medicy sistens observationes et experimenta circa genesin aëris fixi et phlogisticati on the then generally accepted phlogiston theory. In 1787 he became a doctor of philosophy and a private lecturer , shortly thereafter an associate professor of medicine, in 1788 a full professor of philosophy and later also of medicine. He died of tuberculosis .

Gren was one of the main proponents of the phlogiston theory when it was attacked with quantitative methods by the school of Antoine de Lavoisier in the 1780s and increasingly replaced by Lavoisier's teaching ( anti-inflammatory chemistry ), which centered on oxygen. One problem of the phlogiston doctrine was the increase in weight when burning metals, whereby phlogiston was supposed to escape. Gren took the view that the phlogiston was absolutely light, but this was often interpreted in shortened form in such a way that he ascribed it negative weight in order to be able to defend the phlogiston theory. Finally, he (like Trommsdorf) convinced around 1793 attempts by Martin Heinrich Klaproth and Friedrich August Göttling . But he still tried to reconcile the old and the new doctrine by counting light and warmth as the basic elements, instead of counting light and warmth as the basic elements, choosing fire (phlogiston) and warming, and viewing light as a combination of fire and warmth.

Gren was a good, straightforward lecturer and experimenter. While he initially also read about natural history, he later limited himself to chemistry, pharmacology (the name is said to come from him) and physics. From 1790 to 1794 he published the Journal der Physik in Leipzig in eight volumes, from 1795 to 1797 the Neue Journal der Physik in four volumes and then the first issue of the Annalen der Physik . In it he conveyed the new knowledge of foreign countries in the field of combustion theory and galvanism .

In 1788 he isolated cholesterol from gallstones.

In 1792 he was elected a foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In Halle he was accepted into the Masonic lodge to the three swords .

From 1788 he was married to Karsten's daughter Johanna Sophie (1762–1800). His daughter Caroline later became the foster daughter of Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädt and married Eduard Hufeland, the son of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland .

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Friedrich Albrecht Carl Gren  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans SchimankGren, Friedrich Albert Carl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 45 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. On the history of the Green Pharmacy , in Bernburg ( Memento from February 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Schimanek, article Gren in NDB
  4. Gehler: Antiphlogistic System, Antiphlogistic Chemistry ( Memento from January 26, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ Members of the previous academies. Friedrich Albert Carl Gren. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 31, 2015 .
  6. The book appeared under the name GFJ von P. (Jaspen von Pirch) and according to Schimanek (NDB) probably not by him, although he participated