The Gift

Woodcarving


[Woodcarving]





A medieval physician consults a pharmacist in this woodcut from French surgeon Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi.. (Book on the Art of Distilling), an early 16th-century "how-to" book of medical remedies and methods of chemical distillation. Three centuries later, young James Smithson worked to advance "so new a science" as chemistry.