ABSTRACT
Helene Metzger’s La chimie is a popular history of chemistry, and a very short book compared with Les doctrines chimiques, Newton, Stahl, Boerhaave and La genese de la science des cristaux. Metzger studied the early periods of crystallography and chemistry so that she could better observe ‘science in the making’. Metzger’s narrative of chemistry in its nascent phase presents a science marked by profound disunity, which lessens with time, but does not disappear. In her books on chemistry and crystallography in the making, Metzger chose a large number of sources, which, in her own presentation, exhibited no unity. Metzger showed us the complexity of science in the making at every level. She never attempted to eliminate contradictions and inconsistencies from her narrative. As a historian and as a philosopher Metzger wanted to plunge into the supposed confusion and obscurity that the Encylopedie had imputed to chemistry.
