title: Alchemy restored.
abstract: Alchemy now holds an important place in the history of science. Its current status contrasts with its former exile as a "pseudoscience" or worse and results from several rehabilitative steps carried out by scholars who made closer, less programmatic, and more innovative studies of the documentary sources. Interestingly, alchemy's outcast status was created in the eighteenth century and perpetuated thereafter in part for strategic and polemical reasons-and not only on account of a lack of historical understanding. Alchemy's return to the fold of the history of science highlights important features about the development of science and our changing understanding of it.
authors.affiliation: Department of the History of Science and Technology and Department of Chemistry, 301 Gilman Hall, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.
authors.forename: Lawrence M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Principe
mesh_terms: D000422:Alchemy; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy / Q000266:history; D012586:Science / Q000266:history*