Crell, Lorenz Florenz Friedrich von

(b. Helmstedt, Germany, 21 January 1745; d. Göttingen, Germany, 7 June 1816)

chemistry.

His father, Johann Friedrich Crell, professor of medicine at the duchy of Brunswick’s university in Helmstedt, died in 1747. Consequently, Lorenz’ early education was supervised by his maternal grandfather, Lorenz Heister, also a professor of medicine at Helmstedt and one of Germany’s leading surgeons. Crell entered the local university in 1759 and took his M.D. there in 1768. He then spent two and a half years on a study tour to Strasbourg, Paris, Edinburgh, and London. Of the men that he encountered on this trip, William Cullen and Joseph Black, both at Edinburgh, influenced him most. Cullen’s ideas about the causes and treatment of fevers fed Crell’s desire for medical knowledge, while Black’s instruction contributed to a growing interest in chemistry, an interest that his favorite professor at Helmstedt, the alchemist G. C. Beireis, had kindled.

In early 1771, soon after his return to Germany, Crell took a new chair of chemistry at the Collegium Carolinum, a school for prospective officials in the town of Brunswick. Although medicine apparently remained his first interest during his three years there, he acquired a good knowledge of Chemistry’s nonmedical uses by teaching at the Collegium. While there he also became a Freemason, making numerous influential friends who assisted him throughout his career.

Crell returned to his native Helmstedt as professor of medical theory and materia medica in 1774. For a while he devoted his spare time to natural theology, which became a lifelong interest, and to short articles on materia medica, which he published in E. G. Baldinger’s new medical periodical, Magazin vor Aerzte. In 1777, influenced by Baldinger’s example, he decided to found and edit a journal for chemistry; it was to become the first successful discipline-oriented journal in science. Besides an almost unquenchable thirst for renown, Crell was motivated by a nationalistic desire to meet the foreign challenge to traditional German leadership in chemistry, the wish to serve the commonweal by spreading information about this useful science, and the hope of promoting intellectual progress by fostering the development of this fundamental discipline. The first volume of his Chemisches Journal für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrt-heit, Haushaltungskunst and Manufacturen appeared in 1778. It contained a long foreword in which Crell outlined his goals and invited contributions, a section of original treatises, written mostly by Crell, and a section of articles translated from the memories of scientific societies. The reviewers, impressed by Crell’s research and aims, gave the journal a favorable reception. More important was the positive response by several young chemists to Crell’s call for contributions.

Soon the journal was flourishing. By 1781 it was doing so well that Crell began quarterly publication under a new title that reflected his enthusiasm for the rapid pace of innovation in chemistry: Die neuesten Entdeckungen in der Chemie. In 1784 he switched to monthly publication, adopting a title similar to his original one: Chemische Annalen für die Freunde der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst and Manufacturen. In its first year Crell’s monthly had fifty contributors and over 400 subscribers (mostly pharmacists, physicians, professors, and mining officials). Thus, within a few years, Crell had succeeded in creating a forum where German chemists exchanged their findings and views. By putting German chemists in close touch with one another, his journal united them into a German chemical community.

Crell’s position in this community enabled him to exert a strong influence on the German reception of the various theoretical systems being developed to accommodate the new phenomena in gas chemistry. By 1784 he had sided with his correspondent R. Kirwan, who built on the notion that inflammable air (hydrogen) was phlogiston. Thanks largely to Crell’s backing, Kirwan’s views commanded a large following among German chemists in the late 1780’s. Lavoisier’s ideas received comparatively little attention. Crell did not yet recognize them as a threat to the phlogiston concept, of whose German origin he was very proud. In 1789, however, following the appearance of Lavoisier’s Traité and the first German converts to the antiphlogistic doctrine, he began to encourage opposition to the French theory.

All his efforts were to no avail. By 1796 the antiphlogistonists had achieved a predominant position within the German chemical community. Crell, who continued his opposition to Lavoisier’s theory, only discredited himself. In 1798 A. N. Scherer, a young antiphlogistonist, took advantage of the situation by founding the Allgemeines Journal der Chemie. Five years later, the prestigious editorial board consisting of S. F. Hermbstādt, M. H. Klaproth, J. B. Richter, J. B. Trommsdorff, and A. F. Gehlen (the editor in chief) assumed control of Scherer’s journal, titling it the Neues allgemeines Journal der Chemie. Bested by this competition, Crell stopped publishing the Chemische Annalen in 1804 and became an inactive member of his rival’s editorial board.

Crell served science well during much of his career as editor. Realizing this, his contemporaries granted him the recognition he so desired: by 1804 he held the title of mining councillor, belonged to the imperial nobility, and was a member of thirty-nine learned societies. His journal provided scientists in other disciplines and nations (for example, the editors of the Annales de Chimie) with an excellent model of how the trend to specialization could be served. More important, it enabled German chemists to develop a tradition of interacting as members of a discipline-oriented community, a tradition that Liebig subsequently put to very good use.

When the Napoleonic regime closed the university in Helmstedt in 1810, Crell was transferred to Gottingen. He died there in 1816.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Besides his journal, the successive titles of which are given in the text, Crell published two auxiliary journals, many insignificant pieces on medical and chemical topics, books on natural theology and Freemasonrý, and numerous translations. A fairly complete list of his publications is in Johann Stephen Pütter, Versuch einer academischen Gelehrten-Geschichte von der GeorgAugust-Universitāi zu Göttingen, III by J. C. F. Saalfeld (Hannover, 1820), 80–85. which includes a biography of Crell.

II. Secondary Literature. In addition to the biography in Pütter, see Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Memoria Laurentii de Crell… (Göttingen, 1822); and Karl Hufbauer, “The Formation of the German Chemical Community, 1700–1795,” dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 1970). Pütter, Blumenbach, and others incorrectly give Crell’s year of birth as 1744.

Karl Hufbauer