Gershom Bulkeley, “Saltbox Science,” and the Colonial New England Laboratory

Abstract

This article investigates the prolific colonial New England alchemist and physician Gershom Bulkeley (1635/36–1713) and his late seventeenth-century household laboratory. First, I provide an updated bibliography and biography of Bulkeley and then engage an assemblage of surviving commonplace and account books, inventories, a vade mecum, and several books discovered to have been previously owned by Bulkeley. In order to understand Bulkeley’s laboratory, I coin the term “saltbox science,” arguing that his work combined European textual knowledge and temporal and material adaptations within the colonial household and town. I describe first his creative flexibility in regard to the construction of laboratory furnaces that were based on designs initially gained from Europeans. Thereafter, I demonstrate how his laboratory practice was embedded within his household and his town’s temporal rhythms and material networks. Bulkeley’s “saltbox science” is meant to serve as a template for understanding a certain domestic class of seventeenth-century colonial New England alchemists who, in general, leave behind little archival evidence of their laboratory activities.