Lecture, Charles Webster, 'Paracelsus: Chemistry and Revolution'

Oxford History of Chemistry Seminar

Sponsored by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (www.ambix.org)

Tuesday 6 March 2012, 5-7 p.m.
in the History Faculty Lecture Hall, University of Oxford

CHARLES WEBSTER was senior research fellow at All Souls College and previously Reader in the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. Webster is well known for his magisterial study of the Baconian tradition in seventeenth-century science, The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 (1975). In Oxford, he combined his work on early modern science and medicine with a parallel commitment to the history of the National Health Service. As the Official Historian of the NHS, Webster produced a two- volume history of the organisation published in 1988 and 1996. His elegant and definitive analysis of the life and works of Paracelsus: Paracelsus, Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (2008) was shortlisted for the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize for Outstanding Book.