“Elixir” is an account of scientific discovery as well as a cultural history of perfume in France
What separated living from non-living matter? The pair’s work helped lay the foundations of organic chemistry—the study of molecules that contain carbon, the building block of living things. In “Elixir” Theresa Levitt, a professor of history at the University of Mississippi, situates the late-night quest of the two young chemists in its cultural and scientific context.
Meanwhile, Laurent suffered a vindictive rival, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who belittled his work. Squash him like a bug, Dumas’s colleague advised: “Punch him in the stomach such that he doesn’t even think of getting up.” The morose Laurent was an outsider; the book describes at length how he was kicked around by Dumas and others. At one point he drew a sketch of himself jumping headfirst into the Seine. Still, he pressed on.
Laugier and Laurent, who would leave the perfume business, separate, and set up their own labs, benefited from a shift in scientific thought. The sorcery of alchemy and its belief in, the philosopher’s stone, and Aristotle’s four elements of earth, water, fire and air, was being supplanted by the work of an 18th-century scientist, Antoine Lavoisier. He banished the hocus pocus and brought precise language and an enlightened framework to the discipline of chemistry.
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