Andreas Libavius

Andreas Libavius (born Andreas Libau in Halle, died 1616 in Coburg) was a German physician, teacher and writer, remembered above all as an alchemist whose Alchemia of 1597 gathered the known procedures of the craft into one of the earliest chemistry textbooks. The book was arranged in four parts covering the equipment of a laboratory, descriptions of procedures, chemical analysis and transmutation, and he argued that such knowledge should be shared rather than kept secret. He is credited with methods for preparing hydrochloric acid, ammonium sulfate and tin chloride, and he proposed purpose-built chemical houses to make laboratory work safer. Educated at Wittenberg, Jena and Basel, he taught history and poetry at Jena, served as town physician at Rothenburg and finally headed the Casimirianum Gymnasium in Coburg. He defended the transmutation of base metals into gold, kept to Aristotelian and Galenic teaching, and opposed Paracelsus and criticized the Rosicrucian manifestos, while still accepting some of the new chemical remedies.