Robert G. W. Anderson and Jean Jones (eds), The Correspondence of Joseph Black

Abstract

Joseph Black (1728–99) was one of the great figures in the Scottish Enlightenment: doctor to David Hume, Adam Ferguson and James Hutton, and a leading professor in the Edinburgh medical school in its heyday. He was celebrated as a teacher; and for research on heat, which led to his becoming the patron and then close friend of James Watt; and on magnesia, a remedy for heartburn, in which for the first time he followed a cycle of chemical reactions involving a gas, ‘fixed air’ (our carbon dioxide). Eminent and respected all over Europe as a chemist and analyst as well as a physician, he was extremely keen to promote chemistry as an answer to Scotland's economic problems, advising those involved in bleaching and dyeing, metallurgy, water purification, farming, tar making and other practical activities. His lectures attracted big audiences, mostly medical students but also a range of potentially improving landowners, clergy and manufacturers. Unmarried, he kept up with his extensive family, enjoyed social activity with groups that were not exclusively medical and maintained contact with former students in Great Britain, Ireland and overseas. He remained lively and active to the end: in 1790 he wrote to Antoine Lavoisier (letter number 627) confirming his allegiance to the new ‘oxygen’ theory, and his last letter (number 831), written four days before his peaceful death, was concerned with the medical uses of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) promoted by his student Thomas Beddoes and his assistant Humphry Davy.