Oswald Croll

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Title page of the Basilica Chymica, Frankfurt 1629

Oswald Croll ( Latinized Oswaldus Crollius ; * 1560 in Wetter (Hesse) , † December 25, 1609 in Prague ) was a German doctor, pharmacist and alchemist .

Life

Croll was the son of the mayor of Wetter, attended the collegiate school there and studied from 1576 in Marburg, Heidelberg, Strasbourg and Geneva with a doctorate in medicine in Heidelberg in 1582. After that he was tutor (including 1583 to 1590 with the d´Esnes family in Lyon, 1593 to 1597 for Count Maximilian von Pappenheim ) and traveled to Germany, France (Paris), Italy (including Naples, where he met Giambattista della Porta , one of his books was dedicated to him), Hungary and Poland. From 1593 he was a doctor in Brno and Prague. In 1598 he was personal physician to Prince Christian I of Anhalt-Bernburg , who supported him as an alchemist and pharmacist and used him in Prague on diplomatic assignments. His main work, Basilica Chymica, is dedicated to him. In Prague he also advised Emperor Rudolf II , who himself had an alchemical laboratory, and had relationships with the magnate Wok (Wolf) Ursinus von Rosenberg , who was interested in chemistry and who also financed the printing of his main work in the year of his death. In 1607 he visited Rosenberg in Wittingau . His estate, including a box with books of occult content, came into the possession of Rudolf.

He was a follower of iatrochemistry in the succession of Paracelsus , which he concretized in his main work Basilica chymica from 1609 with precise, experimentally tested rules for the manufacture of medicines. The book brought iatrochemistry to prominence in academic circles. He first used succinic acid as a medicine (succinic salt), taught the use of vitriol tartar (Tartarus vitriolatus) and mercury chloride ( calomel , among others for syphilis ) and described how silver chlorine is precipitated from solutions and the synthesis of ether (from alcohol and sulfuric acid) and its use as a remedy. He also described fancy gold . Another book is devoted to the theory of signatures .

He was a Protestant (possibly Calvinist). His brother Johannes, pastor in Kaiserslautern and Koblenz, converted to Catholicism; his brother Porphyrius, a lawyer, was nearly burned as a heretic in Paris.

Fonts

  • Basilica Chymica. Continens philosophicam propria laborum experientia confirmatam descriptionem et usum remediorum chymicorum selectissimorum et lumine gratiae et naturae desumptorum, Frankfurt 1609, with engravings by Aegidius Sadeler and poems by Paul Melissus and Westonia (18 editions up to 1658, including Geneva 1643, 1658; French translation: La royale chimie , 1622; also translated into German and English)
  • De signaturis internis rerum, 1609 (German 1623)

Text output

  • Wilhelm Kühlmann , Joachim Telle (ed.): Oswaldus Crollius: De signaturis internis rerum. The Latin editio princeps (1609) and the first German translation (1623) (= Heidelberg studies on natural history in the early modern period. Volume 5). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-515-06983-6
  • Wilhelm Kühlmann, Joachim Telle (ed.): Alchemomedical letters 1585 to 1597 (= Heidelberg studies on natural history of the early modern times. Volume 6). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1998

literature

  • Gerald Schröder:  Croll, Oswald. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 3, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1957, ISBN 3-428-00184-2 , p. 421 ( digitized version ).
  • Entry in Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989
  • Allen G. Debus: The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New York, Science History Publications, 1977
  • Wilhelm Kühlmann: Oswald Crollius and his signature theory: To the profile of hermetic natural philosophy in the era of Rudolph II., In: The occult sciences in the Renaissance. Edited by August Buck. Wiesbaden 1992 (= Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, Vol. 12), pp. 103–123
  • Wilhelm Kühlmann, Telle (Ed.) Der Frühparacelsismus , 2 volumes, Tübingen 2001, 2004
  • Claus Priesner , Oswald Croll, in: Claus Priesner, Karin Figala : Alchemie. Lexicon of a Hermetic Science, Beck 1998, pp. 102-103
  • Gerhard Menk, Confessional Attitude in Conflict. A case study using the example of Pastor Johannes Croll from Wetter, in: ders., Between pulpit and catheter. Protestant pastors and professor profiles ..., Marburg 2011, p. 509–650, here p. 609 ff. (On the brother and legacy of Croll)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RJW Evans, Rudolf II, Styria 1980, p 100
personal data
SURNAME Croll, Oswald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crollius, Oswald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, pharmacist and alchemist
DATE OF BIRTH 1560
PLACE OF BIRTH Weather (Hessen)
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1609
Place of death Prague