Nicolas Lefèvre (chemist)

Nicolas Lefèvre , also Nicaise Le Febvre or Le Fevre, (* 1610 in Sedan , † 1669 in London ) was a French chemist.

He attended the Calvinist Academy in Sedan and from 1625 worked in his father's pharmacy in Sedan. His father died before the end of his education and he received tuition from the doctor and professor at the Calvinist Academy Abraham Duhan until his master's examination. He then ran his father's pharmacy until around 1646/47 when he went to Paris. In Paris he was initially under the patronage of his co-believer Samuel du Clos and initially gave private courses in pharmacy and chemistry.In 1652 he became the king's pharmacist and demonstrator at the Jardin des Plantes (Jardin du Roi), which means he gave public lectures on chemistry there. He also taught royalist emigrants from England such as Kenelm Digby . In 1664 he went to London at the invitation of Charles II , where he was court pharmacist, royal professor and since 1661 a member of the Royal Society . He died in the spring of 1669 and is buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields .

He is the author of one of the first chemistry textbooks, which first appeared in 1660. The book was based on many of our own experiments and had numerous editions. He distinguished pure chemistry from pharmaceutical chemistry (whereby in the foreword he noted the lead of contemporary German pharmaceutical chemistry, especially Johann Schröder and Johann Zwelfer ), was a supporter of iatrochemistry in the footsteps of Paracelsus and an opponent of alchemical fraud. He observed an increase in mass during the calcination of metals (antimony) with focal mirrors.

He was editor of the description of the preparation of Great Cordial by Walter Raleigh (a pharmaceutical work, London 1664), but is not identical with the translator of Thomas Browne into French ( Religion du médecin , The Hague 1688).

literature

• Nicaise Lefebvre, also Le Fevre. In: Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists . Harri Deutsch, 1989.
• Owen Hannaway: Nicaise Le Febvre . In: Dictionary of Scientific Biography .
• JR Partington A history of chemistry . Volume 3, 1962.
• Paul Dorveaux: L'apothicaire LeFebvre Nicaise, dit Nicolas . In: Proceedings of the Third International Congress of the History of Medicine. London, 1922 (Antwerp, 1923), pp. 207-212. Also in Bulletin de la Société d'histoire de la pharmacie. no. 42, May 1924, pp. 345-356, published.
• H. Metzger: Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIe siécle . Paris 1923 (reprinted 1969), pp. 62-82.

Fonts

• Chimie théorique et pratique. Paris 1660, 1669, 1674 (and 1751 as Cours de Chymie edited by Arthur Du Monstier, pharmacist in the Navy)
  • English translation: A compendious body of chemistry. London 1662, 1664, 1670, 1740
  • German translation: Chymischer Handleiter. Nuremberg 1672, as well as 1675, 1676, 1685, 1688,
  • Latin translation: Besançon 1751

Individual evidence

1. ^ Owen Hannaway: Le Febvre. In: Dictionary of Scientific Biography .
2. ↑ 5 editions that appeared in Leiden from 1669 and 1696.
3. ↑ In reality by Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy.