Angelo Sala

Angelo Sala, in Latin Angelus Sala (1576 to 1637), was an Italian doctor and early iatrochemist, born at Vicenza and dying at Butzow. He promoted chemical remedies and, weighing the conflicting chemical and Galenical systems of medicine, dismissed alchemical transmutation and universal medicine. He observed that metals react differently with acids, that sulphur takes something from the air in order to burn, and that silver nitrate darkens on exposure to light, and he surmised elementary atomic particles. His first studies of the formation of alcohol from fermenting musts mean he is regarded as the founder of sugar chemistry. The son of a spinner, he probably learned pharmacy in Venice and, as a Calvinist, left Italy; his career as a medical doctor without academic studies led him to Dresden, Sondrio, Nuremberg and Frauenfeld, and he settled in Geneva in 1609, after serving as city doctor at Winterthur. He subscribed to a corpuscular theory, holding that fermentation was a regrouping of elementary particles, and exposed the tricks by which alchemists seemed to turn tin into silver. He decomposed blue copper vitriol into copper ash, acid spirit and water and recombined them into the original vitriol, and he synthesised sal ammoniac.