The marvellous Mrs Marcet

Mrs B has a reluctant pupil. ‘To confess the truth,’ says Caroline, a sparky and sometimes rather cheeky teenager, ‘I am not disposed to form a very favourable idea of chemistry, nor do I expect to derive much entertainment from it.’ To Caroline, chemistry amounts to ‘the mixing up of a few insignificant drugs’.

Mrs B soon sets her straight. Even at the start of the 19th century, when this conversation was published, a ‘chemist’ signified to many people what it still does today, at least in the UK: someone who dispenses drugs, or as Mrs B puts it, ‘the apothecary’s shop’. But Mrs B tells her student that ‘the most wonderful and the most interesting phenomena of nature are almost all of them produced by chemical powers’.