Chemist and Experimentalist

This chapter introduces chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville, who studied organic decomposition, echoing Newton's view, in Query #30 of the Opticks, that decay was a natural breakdown process in which substances were reduced to their component elements. The chapter then tracks her early life, in which she was born into a rich tax farmer family in 1720, and the rudimentary experiments she performed as a child. It also narrates her shift to intellectual pursuits after she contracted smallpox at twenty-two. Turning her energies to learning, d'Arconville taught herself languages starting with English and Italian, translating over the many next decades literary and scientific works that she admired, and publishing many original ones of her own on morality, history, fiction, and science. The chapter then presents the intellectuals with whom d'Arconville developed a close kinship: chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer, doctor chemist François Paul Lyon Poulletier de la Salle, and surgeon Jean-Joseph Sue.