Frankenstein's Cat.pdf - University of Cincinnati

THE REICHENBACH AFFAIR
was finally induced to do so as a result of unbearable
harassment.
According to Liebig biographer, William Brock, the most
probable source of Liebig’s “unbearable harassment”
was the Scottish chemist, William Gregory (figure 7)
(20). Gregory, who had studied under Liebig at Giessen,
was the most important proponent of Liebig’s views on
agricultural and physiological chemistry among Englishspeaking
chemists and had also translated several of
Liebig’s books into English. In short, he was an indispensable
conduit for the propagation of Liebig’s scientific
reputation and influence outside of Germany. !
! Gregory also had a fairly decent reputation of his
own as a chemist and teacher of chemistry, though this
was increasingly tarnished in his later years by his almost
pathological addiction to pseudoscientific claims of all
sorts, including spiritualism, phrenology, clairvoyance,
and animal magnetism. The results of this addiction
were aptly described by one of Gregory’s fellow faculty
members at the University of Edinburgh, who has left
us with an account of one of Gregory’s attempts to
defend his views in public (21):
... he dosed his audience with all the common trash of
mesmerism, clairvoyance, table-turning and spiritrapping,
and declared his belief in all of them and in
every alleged fact connected with them. He had the
egregious simplicity to declare that he had seen a
table, of its own accord, making “gracious movements,”
and walking from one part of the room to
another; and that he believed, on the authority of a
witness whose testimony was indisputable, that a pet
table had in a similar fashion followed its mistress
upstairs like a dog. I was not present, thinking it a
shame to encourage in any shape the Professor of
Chemistry in making a donkey of himself and a
laughing-stock of the University.
! Gregory immediately translated the initial installment
of Reichenbach’s work in the Annalen into English
(8), as well as the expanded two-volume edition which
Reichenbach brought out in 1849 under the expansive
title [in translation] of Physico-Physiological Researches
in the Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light,
Crystallization, and Chemism in their Relations to Vital
Force, and which contained much of the material that
Liebig had refused to publish as a second installment
of the supplement (9).
! In his 1850 English translation of this work,
Gregory managed to drag yet another famous chemist
into the controversy by claiming that the great Berzelius
(recall figure 3) had fully endorsed Reichenbach’s work
in a letter written shortly before his death in 1848 (9):
Figure 7. William Gregory (1803-1858).
... the lamented Berzelius took a very deep interest in
the investigation and expressed in a letter to the editor
that it could not possibly be in better hands than those
of Baron von Reichenbach.
– an endorsement considered important enough to be
repeated over a century later by René Sudre in his
well-known monograph on parapsychology (22):
Reichenbach’s experiments were treated with contempt by
the scientific world in spite of the patronage of Berzelius ...
These claims are consistent with what little is said of
Reichenbach in Berzelius’ correspondence with other
chemists. Though falling short of out and out endorsement,
Berzelius’ comments do display an interest in
Reichenbach’s results, a lack of overt criticism, and
support of Reichenbach’s right to publish his experiments,
however controversial.
! Thus in January of 1845, shortly after the publication
of Reichenbach’s initial papers in the Annalen,
Berzelius wrote to Wöhler expressing his confusion
over Liebig’s apparently contradictory behavior in this
matter (23):
I have just had a long and mystical letter from Reichenbach
in Vienna concerning a natural force which he
believes he has discovered, whose effects, however, are
detectable only by persons with a morbid sensitivity of
the nervous system, similar to that encountered in
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