As I’ve written in my introduction to the red ochre book project, after I had been working on the red ochre book for about a year and a half, I stared working on the role that ferric oxide (i.e., red ochre) played in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in the development of chemistry and medicine. A lot of the writing had to due with what we would call carbonated irony springs which were quite popular back then. As I dug deeper and deeper into trying to understand the way the scientists of the era tried to make sense of what was going on with these springs, I found myself going back farther and farther back in time to understand how chemistry and medicine had gotten to the place they were in the first place and the role these springs played in that story. By the time I looked up I realized that I had way too much for a chapter of a book on red ochre. This was a completely different book that stood on its own merit.
I had two choices. I could drop the entire what I had been doing for the past six months and go back to the book on red ochre . . . or I could keep going on what I had spent the last couple of months working on. Of course, I just kept going with what I was immersed in at the moment. I wanted to see how the story ended!
Along the way I had also figured out a hook for the book centered on a mineral described at length by the Roman historian Pliny in the 1st century AD that became famously know as Pliny’s fountain. I saw that this spring could play a critical role in the story I wanted to tell both in terms of mystery surrounding the spring as well as using each chapter to analyze part of the Pliny’s description of the powers of the spring in the context of the evolution of thinking about what today we would call chemistry and medicine.
What would end up being the research for this book began in the fall of 2009 and would continue off and on for about four years until the fall of 2013 when I reached out to the next shiny object, what would become the “Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and New Orleans Civil Patrol” project in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. During the four years I worked on “In Search of Pliny’s Fountain,” in addition to research, I did quite a bit of writing of chapter, although I always liked researching more than writing. In looking back at what I had done, I see that as I would write the first part of a chapter and then move onto the next chapter before the previous chapter was finished. In addition, I wrote a stand alone essay “Making Sense of Ferrugo and Ferrugineus” that I have included here for your reading pleasure and edification.
As it stands the structure of the book was organized in the following chapters:
Preface
Chapter 1 Pliny the Elder
Chapter 2 The Big Celebration
Chapter 3 “Making Sense of Ferrugo and Ferrugineus”
Chapter 4 “A certain ferruginous taste”
Chapter 5 Georgius Agricola and the Acidulae
Chapter 6 Paracelsus & Vitriol
Chapter 7 Spirits in the Water
Chapter 8 Joan Baptista Van Helmont
Chapter 9 In Search of an English Spaw
Chapter 10 Secrets of the Chalybeates
Chapter 11 Enter Friedrich Hoffmann
Chapter 12 Fixed Air
Chapter 13 Phlogiston
Chapter 14 Enter the Mineralogists
Chapter 15 The Chemical Revolution
Chapter 16 Limbourg versus Villenfagne
Chapter 15 Conclusion
I have attached the first parts of several of these chapters that are cleaned up enough to be intelligible to give you a better sense of what kind of book I intended. As with the red ochre book project, all the material is up in boxes in the attic and I could easily pick up where I left off if I get motivated to do so.