Weird Science

Urine for a big surprise

The Scientific Revolution. A sixteenth- and seventeenth-century period during which European thinkers set aside superstition and embraced scientific reasoning. Gone were the days of believing outlandish myths and obvious nonsense. Or were they?

For example.

In 1669, a German alchemist named Hennig Brand cooked 1,500 gallons of human urine, seeking to distill the yellow liquid into gold. He slowly cooked the pee of beer drinkers until it reached the consistency of honey. He spent weeks doing this. For hours each day. Slowly simmering human urine. Expecting to transform it into gold.

Shockingly, Brand’s urine-soaked experiments never yielded gold. Instead, he found another sort of “P” glowing at the bottom of his pot. He had discovered how to make phosphorus. Today, P is the symbol for phosphorus on the periodic table, suggesting that even chemists have a sense of humor.

It wasn’t gold, but Brand’s discovery might have been more valuable. Phosphorus is a key ingredient in fertilizers is used to make matches, and more. It was the first chemical element discovered scientifically rather than learned from ancient sources. This was a big step in the development of modern chemistry. During the Scientific Revolution, early European scientists dabbled in all sorts of weird science. Just because it was weird—and often wrong—doesn’t mean it wasn’t science.

Oops, I invented chemistry

Brand was an alchemist. What comes to your mind when you hear the word alchemy? If you’re a fantasy reader, you might associate it with magic rather than science. Alchemists wanted to turn lead (or iron, copper, or pee) into gold. They wanted to create the philosopher’s stone and brew an elixir that cheated death. It all sounds like magic. But alchemists behaved like other early scientists. They investigated nature through experiments. The only difference was that they happened to be wrong a lot of the time. But like Brand, they were often wrong in the right ways.

These were serious people doing serious work. Remember Isaac Newton? The famous guy who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation and whose name is synonymous with the Scientific Revolution? Yeah, he was an alchemist. And so was Robert Boyle, the “father of modern chemistry.” Alchemists like Newton and Boyle didn’t create gold or find the secret to eternal life, but they discovered and isolated new substances. They refined laboratory practices such as distillation, sublimation, and the preparation of mineral acids. Some historians have argued that Newton’s work in alchemy—in which practitioners believed invisible forces caused interactions between metals and other substances—helped prepare him to propose the concept of gravity—an invisible force pulling objects through space.

Magnets—how do they work?

Today, science and magic seem like polar opposites. Science is based on reason and experiment while magic is mystical and unknowable. But in the sixteenth century, people didn’t see the two as separate. Natural philosophers were studying gases, gravity, microscopic organisms, magnetism, and distant stars. Basically, you had all these people trying to figure out how to observe and measure stuff they couldn’t see. Many thinkers during the Scientific Revolution called this “natural magic.” They saw it as the practical, hands-on method of uncovering unseen and unexplained powers in nature. The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher wrote, “there are as many types of natural magic as there are subjects of applied sciences.”

To better understand this concept, let’s consider two controversial and related ideas of the Scientific Revolution: the weapon salve and magnets. Both ideas involve a natural force acting on objects at a distance. Both involve Athanasius Kircher.

The weapon salve was a medical cure popular during the Scientific Revolution. Practitioners claimed that the salve could cure wounds if applied to the weapon that caused the injury. It was based on the belief that an invisible connection linked the weapon and the wound. John Dee, an English polymath and alchemist, was a proponent of the salve, and his library held a recipe for it: Moss from a dead man’s skull, linseed oil, human fat and blood, oil of roses combined with a red clay from Armenia, and some powdered mummy. He claimed this recipe could be smeared on a weapon and heal patients up to 30 miles away.

Of course, that sounds ridiculous to us today. But you might be surprised at how many of the innovations and discoveries of the Scientific Revolution started out in a very magical place.

For example, let me describe magnets to you in a way someone from 1600 might have:

There exist certain stones that hold an invisible power within them. This power draws iron to it, though no rope nor hand nor visible thread connects them. If you rub a needle of iron upon this stone, the needle itself takes up the power. If you suspend such a needle upon a straw floating in a bowl of water, so it may turn freely, it will not rest until one end points toward the North Star.

I mean… if you’re willing to believe that, maybe you’d buy a bottle or two of weapon salve. You know… just in case.

Consider: If you didn’t know better, would you really think the weapon salve sounded more ridiculous than a magnet at the top of the Earth that draws certain rocks toward it with an invisible force? Athanasius Kircher rejected the weapon salve as nonsense and feared that using the weapon salve made people vulnerable to demonic forces. When it came to magnets, however, he was a believer. He wrote a big book in which he got a whole lot of stuff wrong. Kircher understood that magnets exert a real, invisible force that can attract iron and work at a distance. However, he also believed that magnets were part of a broader system of hidden “sympathies” that connected many things throughout nature, including God, whom Kircher called “the central magnet of all things.” Thankfully, other thinkers were also working out how magnets worked, including William Gilbert and René Descartes. Gilbert—writing 40 years before Kircher and Descartes—came closest to our modern scientific view. He used experiments and correctly connected compass behavior to Earth’s magnetism, arguing that Earth itself behaves like a giant magnet.

Early scientists knew where the bodies were buried

What’s especially cool about the Scientific Revolution is just how strange things got. While many discoveries happened accidentally, some advances came about through some truly questionable methods.

Some early scientists wanted to understand the human body. And you can’t understand the human body easily because, of course, it’s all…inside humans. Getting it on the outside is a messy process. Early biologists needed bodies, preferably dead ones. But they faced an inconvenient truth. Cadavers for study usually came from executions, and were provided by governments to medical schools. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, executions had started to decline in parts of Europe, just as medical schools were multiplying and more people wanted to study the human body. With no refrigeration available, eager students needed fresh corpses. Many early anatomists turned to an age-old solution: crime.

Frustrated by the lack of officially provided corpses, students in London, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Edinburgh started illegally digging up freshly buried bodies from churchyards. In general, the punishments for this grave robbing were lenient, including small fines or imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, so-called “resurrection men” thrived in the business of body-snatching. And even when the bodies were not illegally sourced, the process was still unsavory. Many bodies that the government gave to schools came from orphanages, prisons, and poor houses.

Their methods were macabre, but early anatomists made real breakthroughs in understanding the human body. For nearly 1,400 years, much of European medicine had been based on the authority of the ancient physicians like Galen. Galen, who worked mostly with animal dissections, wrote that blood was made in the liver and that it passed through invisible pores in the heart, where it mixed with “vital spirits.” Few in Europe questioned the accuracy of his conclusions until anatomists got their hands on some cadavers. Andreas Vesalius is often called the founder of human anatomy. In the mid-sixteenth century, he and his students did their own share of stealing corpses from gallows and graveyards. His dissections exposed big flaws in Galen’s work. Building on the work of Vesalius and others, William Harvey proposed in 1628 that the heart pumps blood through the body in a one-way circuit. That’s fourteen centuries of ancient wisdom unraveled with the aid of stolen bodies.

Conclusion

For most of history, the line we now draw between “science” and “magic” didn’t exist. Astronomy and astrology. Chemistry and alchemy. These disciplines overlapped and melded together. The scholars we now credit with inventing modern science were, by our standards, also mystics, treasure hunters, and magicians. If alchemists hadn’t spent centuries trying to turn lead or urine into gold, they might never have built the discipline of chemistry. If anatomists hadn’t illegally procured cadavers, our understanding of biology would not be where it is today. Untangling the threads of science and magic took the better part of two centuries, and it took a lot of trial and error. A lot of those “errors”—such as phosphorus—ended up changing the world.