George Elliott (Brown)
"Nullius in Verba: A Saltbox Scientist in his Chamber Laboratory"
In this dissertation chapter, I build on the work of historians of early modern European alchemy and science as well as English colonial alchemy to describe the social history of seventeenth-century New England laboratories and their alchemical practitioners. While work has been done to understand the presence of alchemists within New England, their daily practices and meaning remain less understood, especially compared to their European peers. Using the surviving records of the minister-turned-alchemist Gershom Bulkeley, I argue for the entanglement of experimental and domestic lives within the homes of the region’s social elite. Bulkeley constructed and stocked an alchemical laboratory within his Wethersfield, Connecticut household, a saltbox home situated in the center of the town. There, he produced and experimented with alchemical medicines for his medical practice for more than 30 years. However, his daily work expanded beyond this central room as he trialed fertilizers in his saltbox garden and conducted meteorological observations through his windows. I argue that all such experimental activities across the saltbox’s many spaces fell interspersed between the hours of Bulkeley’s other domestic life lived amongst family and the household’s enslaved.
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