ABSTRACT
The late historian of science Frederic Lawrence Holmes began a recent book on the early researches of Antoine Lavoisier (Holmes, 1998) by noting the extreme difference between the public face of the great 18th-century scientist and the image suggested by his laboratory notebooks: “We … see a public Lavoisier announcing for the first time an ‘epochal’ theory with a grand gesture and an aura of self-assurance that contrasts strikingly with the trepidations of the private investigator” (p. 4). For Holmes, this discrepancy was important, and his search, as a historian, for the roots of scientific creativity led him to the intensive examination of notebooks and laboratory diaries, not just of Lavoisier but of Hans Krebs and of Claude Bernard as well.
