Marie Meurdrac

Marie Meurdrac (about 1610 to 1680) was a French chemist and alchemist, born at Mandres-les-Roses southeast of Paris into a landowning family whose father Vincent was a local notary. Self-taught, she learned chemistry from the experiments and theoretical works of other scientists, and she worked with a high-temperature furnace, unusual in her time because it needed special permission from the king. She is remembered for La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames, a treatise on chemistry for women that covers laboratory technique, the properties of medicines and cosmetics, a table of weights and 106 alchemical symbols used in medicine. Scholars have argued that it was the first work on chemistry or alchemy by a woman since that of Maria the Jewess in late antiquity, and the historian Lucia Tosi calls her the first woman to publish a book on early chemistry. Reluctant to write for fear of criticism of women's education, she held that minds have no sex.