Greg House: Man of Science, Son of Alchemy
Researchgrrrl, I hear you say warily, we cannot help but fear that in your new love of the totally hot and heart-stoppingly lickable Winchester boys that, well, you have completely lost your shit as evinced by the subject line...perhaps you sustained mild brain damage when inhaling the poison death gas yesterday?
Fear not, I must hastily reply, because my shit would have been lost yesterday regardless of trying to figure out a paranormal plotline that will require much loss of clothing for Sam and Dean and possibly a plunge for them into a tub filled with pudding because I dream big.
And then I must pause to remember where I was going with all this as I blink away that image.
Oh. Yes. Not even a dipshit armed with an open container of toxic fumes could leave me as light-headed as I am today. Because last night's ep of HOUSE? Gives me the world's best excuse to natter on about Egypt, history, alchemy, chemistry, and Greg House all in the same essay. I...oh...ooh. God. So gonna neepgasm again just from writing this. Brace yourself, gang. This is where we get to be thinky and kinky.
A (Very) Brief History of Western Alchemy [ETA a new link here]
The alchemy known and practiced in the Western world originated in Egypt. (The word Khem was used in reference to the fertility of the flood plains around the Nile.) Between their beliefs in the life that waited after death and the mummification procedures they developed, Egyptians probably gave rise to rudimentary chemical knowledge and a goal of immortality.
By the time 332BCE rolled around, Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt. The Greeks totally glommed on to the Egyptian sacred science, merging that with their own views on nature being made up of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.
In fact, Khemia even became the Greek word for Egypt. Later, when the Arabs occupied Egypt (sometime in the seventh century), they added al- to the word Khemia; al-Khemia ("the Black Land") is considered a possible origin for the word alchemy. The other candidate is the Greek word khumos ("fluid") but there's no way to know for sure, what with invading Christians burning down the great library in Alexandria in 391 and destroying the relevant texts.
(I'm skipping Eastern alchemy for this post. Actually, I'm even going to fast-forward and globe-trot shamelessly to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so I can hurry up and get to the fun House-related bits.)
By the 1700s, there were two groups of alchemists in Europe: the group who was all about the discovery of new compounds and their reactions, thus creating foundation for the modern science of chemistry; and the group who concentrated on the metaphysical side of alchemy, still seeking the means of achieving immortality and transmuting base metals into gold, and ultimately established what we now think of as alchemy.
Purple of Cassius: No, It's Not One of the Narnia Books
So. As of the seventeenth century, alchemy had led to the discovery of how to manufacture amalgams, as well as advances in other chemical processes and the apparatus required for them. Here's where you must permit me to introduce you to Andreas Cassius, a Bohemian physician who developed the formula for creating ruby red glass in 1685 still used today. How? He got a bright red precipitate to drop out in solution from reacting stannic acid with gold; that color came to be known as Purple of Cassius.
What's cool is that it took another couple of centuries for anyone to figure out why the hell (essentially) tin reacting with gold resulted in Purple of Cassius. A chemist from Vienna, Richard Zsigmondy, finally figured it out (it's all about the properties of colloids, baby!) and eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1925 for his colloid research.
Pretty fuckin' awesome the way something that started with dreams of immortality (and, god, yes, I did totally type "immorality" the first time) and creating gold started things rolling for Nobel Prize winning research, huh? OMG. DO YOU PEOPLE SEE WHY I SQUEE OVER SUCH WEIRD SHIT IN HISTORY AND SCIENCE?
Well, that's all well and good, you might graciously allow, because, yeah, House knew all about simple field tests for the presence of gold and probably even searching for gold in Egypt, but we're still not entirely sure where you're going with the whole thing with House and alchemy.
And here, instead of some lame-ass attempt at a snazzy answer, I'll simply point you to this quote, used to describe some important alchemists here:
"They did not seek glory, but actually shunned it. ...They devoted themselves to helping their fellow men; this they did in the most useful way, which does not consist in healing the ills of the body or in improving men's physical state. They used a higher method, which in the first instance can be applied only to a small number, but eventually affects all of us. They helped the noblest minds to reach the goal that they had reached themselves. ...They had no school and no regular teaching, because their teaching was on the border of the human and the divine. But they knew that a truthful word, a seed of gold sown at a certain time in a certain soul would bring results a thousand times greater than those that could accrue from the knowledge gained through books or ordinary science."
In Conclusion
Oh GOD. Subtext be damned...the elegance of the insight that we had into House last night through how he solved the mystery with stannous chloride and us learning about his childhood searches for mummies in Egypt gave me the biggest geekgasm EVER. Just look at how it all comes together!
Whew. Anyone else need a shower and a cigarette now?
Fear not, I must hastily reply, because my shit would have been lost yesterday regardless of trying to figure out a paranormal plotline that will require much loss of clothing for Sam and Dean and possibly a plunge for them into a tub filled with pudding because I dream big.
And then I must pause to remember where I was going with all this as I blink away that image.
Oh. Yes. Not even a dipshit armed with an open container of toxic fumes could leave me as light-headed as I am today. Because last night's ep of HOUSE? Gives me the world's best excuse to natter on about Egypt, history, alchemy, chemistry, and Greg House all in the same essay. I...oh...ooh. God. So gonna neepgasm again just from writing this. Brace yourself, gang. This is where we get to be thinky and kinky.
A (Very) Brief History of Western Alchemy [ETA a new link here]
The alchemy known and practiced in the Western world originated in Egypt. (The word Khem was used in reference to the fertility of the flood plains around the Nile.) Between their beliefs in the life that waited after death and the mummification procedures they developed, Egyptians probably gave rise to rudimentary chemical knowledge and a goal of immortality.
By the time 332BCE rolled around, Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt. The Greeks totally glommed on to the Egyptian sacred science, merging that with their own views on nature being made up of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.
In fact, Khemia even became the Greek word for Egypt. Later, when the Arabs occupied Egypt (sometime in the seventh century), they added al- to the word Khemia; al-Khemia ("the Black Land") is considered a possible origin for the word alchemy. The other candidate is the Greek word khumos ("fluid") but there's no way to know for sure, what with invading Christians burning down the great library in Alexandria in 391 and destroying the relevant texts.
(I'm skipping Eastern alchemy for this post. Actually, I'm even going to fast-forward and globe-trot shamelessly to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so I can hurry up and get to the fun House-related bits.)
By the 1700s, there were two groups of alchemists in Europe: the group who was all about the discovery of new compounds and their reactions, thus creating foundation for the modern science of chemistry; and the group who concentrated on the metaphysical side of alchemy, still seeking the means of achieving immortality and transmuting base metals into gold, and ultimately established what we now think of as alchemy.
Purple of Cassius: No, It's Not One of the Narnia Books
So. As of the seventeenth century, alchemy had led to the discovery of how to manufacture amalgams, as well as advances in other chemical processes and the apparatus required for them. Here's where you must permit me to introduce you to Andreas Cassius, a Bohemian physician who developed the formula for creating ruby red glass in 1685 still used today. How? He got a bright red precipitate to drop out in solution from reacting stannic acid with gold; that color came to be known as Purple of Cassius.
What's cool is that it took another couple of centuries for anyone to figure out why the hell (essentially) tin reacting with gold resulted in Purple of Cassius. A chemist from Vienna, Richard Zsigmondy, finally figured it out (it's all about the properties of colloids, baby!) and eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1925 for his colloid research.
Pretty fuckin' awesome the way something that started with dreams of immortality (and, god, yes, I did totally type "immorality" the first time) and creating gold started things rolling for Nobel Prize winning research, huh? OMG. DO YOU PEOPLE SEE WHY I SQUEE OVER SUCH WEIRD SHIT IN HISTORY AND SCIENCE?
Well, that's all well and good, you might graciously allow, because, yeah, House knew all about simple field tests for the presence of gold and probably even searching for gold in Egypt, but we're still not entirely sure where you're going with the whole thing with House and alchemy.
And here, instead of some lame-ass attempt at a snazzy answer, I'll simply point you to this quote, used to describe some important alchemists here:
"They did not seek glory, but actually shunned it. ...They devoted themselves to helping their fellow men; this they did in the most useful way, which does not consist in healing the ills of the body or in improving men's physical state. They used a higher method, which in the first instance can be applied only to a small number, but eventually affects all of us. They helped the noblest minds to reach the goal that they had reached themselves. ...They had no school and no regular teaching, because their teaching was on the border of the human and the divine. But they knew that a truthful word, a seed of gold sown at a certain time in a certain soul would bring results a thousand times greater than those that could accrue from the knowledge gained through books or ordinary science."
In Conclusion
Oh GOD. Subtext be damned...the elegance of the insight that we had into House last night through how he solved the mystery with stannous chloride and us learning about his childhood searches for mummies in Egypt gave me the biggest geekgasm EVER. Just look at how it all comes together!
Whew. Anyone else need a shower and a cigarette now?