Pink Fairy Armadillo - What the Fukunushi?

Pink fairy armadillo, 11" x 13", multimedia by Ele Willoughby, 2018

I'm taking part in Graven Feather's collaboration with the Japanese Paper Place, the 'What the Fukunishi?' exhibit from March 21 through April 1 at 906 Queen St West, Toronto

Exhibition hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday 12-6pm & Sunday 12-4pm. Inspired by their description of these rose and pale yellow fukunishi papers as being "an excellent support material for a huge variety of medias and techniques" I decided to mix it up. This piece combines linocut, collage and colour pencil to show the adorable sand swimmer, the pink fairy armadillo, a tiny armoured mammal, also known as a pichiciego or Chlamyphorus truncatus, who lives in desserts or xerix scrublands of central Argentina. These uncommon tiny armadillos are only 90–115 mm (3.5–4.5 in) long, subterranean and nocturnal. They are rarely seen and their numbers are declining, due to farming, hunting and predation from domestic pets. Sadly they do not survive long in captivity. Its giant forepaws allow it to dig its burrow and explain it's nickname, the "sand-swimmer". 

 

You can also find a series of prints in my shop of just the animal itself.

 

Pink Fairy Armadillo I, linocut and collage on washi paper, 12" x 8", Ele Willoughby, 2018

 

Merit Ptah, Ancient Egyptian Chief Physician

Merit Ptah, Chief Physician, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14", 2018

[Edit, January 16, 2020: Please see my latest post of the subject of Merit Ptah. New research indicates she never existed and her story was confusion about a real woman doctor Peseshet.]

Since it's Women's History Month, I thought I would like to add another women to my series of STEM portraits. I'm also interested in adding more women of colour to my collection; if women in the history of science are too often invisible, this is doubly so for WOC, who of course have been granted fewer opportunities to participate in science, throughout history. It turns out that the earliest recorded woman in science was a woman of colour and one of the earliest known person in STEM at all. Merit Ptah ("beloved of [the god] Ptah") lived circa 2700 BCE and was chief physician of the pharoah's court, implying not only that she was recognized as a doctor, who attended the pharoah, but that she trained and supervised other doctors, during the Second or Third Dynasty of Ancient Egypt.

This image is the first to come up for a Google image
search of Merit Ptah, but that dude is wearing a kilt.

Very little is known about Merit Ptah. Her image and an inscription left on her grave by her son, a Chief Priest, is found in Saqqara in Egypt's Valley of Kings. He describes her as the Chief Physician. I don't believe there exist any other known text or images relating to her. So researching her and figuring out how I could portray her was a challenge. In fact, I have not been able to find the portrait of her which can be found in Saqqara - or at least, I can not find an image I am convinced is in fact actually her. Since she is regarded as the earliest known woman in STEM, there are many articles about her, but they all seem to repeat the information above and they are illustrated with unconvincing images. I try to be cautious, as a scientist, to check references, and I know that sometimes when scientists write the history of science, they make mistakes that historians might have avoided. (Occassionally I read history of science where the converse is true, and I wish authors either had more pertinent science training or worked with scientists in the field to identify questions to ask and answer... but suspect scientists who over-estimate their knowledge of history are more common).

This image, and ones like it, are often used to illustrate
articles about Merit Ptah. These authors have done better.
I think this is a woman named Merit Ptah, but the complexity 
of the New Kingdom carving, her elaborate hairdo and crown 
reveal her as the wife of Ramsose and not the physician who
lived a millenium earlier!

I care about the history of science and want to do it justice, and am aware I lack training in history, or in this case Egyptology... though I was helped by the fact that I happened to have taken an undergraduate course in Ancient Egyptian Religion! So, I did have a bit of general knowlege about ancient Egypt which helped me avoid some of the misinformation out there. The first thing that people often miss is that Ancient Egyptian civilization spans more than three and a half thousand years, and it cannot all be lumped together. One funny fact that I recalled was that Egyptologists are able to date an image of people by variations in hair styles; my professor showed us an image of members of a royal family of a certain era and pointed out that the pharoah's wife had the latest hair style while her mother-in-law was still sporting that of a bygone era! Plus ça change... So, knowing that Merit Ptah can be confused for another woman of the same name, Merit-Ptah, the wife of Ramose, the Governor of Thebes and Vizier under Akhenaten, a full millenium later, I knew to consider her hair and dress when looking at images purporting to be of the physician.

Like hair styles, fashion also evolved and gives us a clue to era. This is a bit harder for a non-specialist to identify, since the basics of Ancient Egyptian dress did remain pretty similar for thousands of years. Both women and men often sported long hair and wore kolh around their eyes. The well-known Egyptian eye was not just for fashion. It served as sound preventative medicine as it helped protect against infections of the eye like conjuctivitis. In general, men wore kilts and women wore shealth dresses and shawls. But even just knowing this fact makes me question an image many articles claim is a bas relief of Merit Ptah; I'm pretty sure it depicts a man!

So after spending a few fruitless days seeking a contemporary portrait of Merit Ptah, I decided my best bet was to research medicine and doctors in Ancient Egypt, related hieroglyphs and images of women from the Second Dynasty. I sought images of non-royal women of status as well as researching the history of fashion, so that I could produce a plausible portrait, if not her likeness.

I've selected to use hieroglyphs to indicate who is shown and her role. I have taken some artistic license and hope that this is reasonably accurate. Luckily for me, ancient Egyptians were not hung up on careful spelling and were pretty flexible in their use of hieroglyphics, so I hope that my combination gleaned from different sources is reasonably accurate. It's not hard to find the name of the god Ptah in hieroglyphs but I was unsure if I just needed to append "beloved". Luckily the French wikipedia has an entry for the given name Méryt-Ptah name here which includes the hieroglyphs I've printed horizontally. I have her title vertically. From what I've read, I inferred that the inscription about Merit Ptah likely read "wer swnwt per aa" where "wer" means chief and I believe can be indicated by the swallow, "swnwt" is the feminine form of doctor, indicated by the arrow, pot and half-circle (for the feminine -t suffix), and "per aa" means great house or palace (the sort of rectangle with a opening is house and the last irregular shape indicated great).
Some the earliest doctors recorded were moreorless contemporaries of Merit Ptah. Polymath Imhotep (late 27th century BCE) was ultimately deified and the Greeks identified him with their own god of medicine, Asklepios, so it is assumed he was a physician, though there is little hard evidence of this. Hesy-Ra (3rd Dynasty, 2687-2649 BCE) lived roughly the same time and is identified as both official and dentist. The fact that there were dentists at this time gives us a hint that there were already different medical specialists. Others include ophthalmologist, gastroenterologist, and proctologist; midwives were separate from doctors and all female.  There is a second female doctor of the Old Kingdom, whose name is preserved: Peseshet (5th Dynasty, 2465-2323, later than Merit Ptah), "lady overseer of the female physicians" is often also identified as the earliest known female doctor, though some argue she might have been an overseer without being a doctor (which strikes me a bending over backwards to be extra skeptical of women participating in science... surely Occam's Razor would favour the hypothesis that the overseer of doctors would be a doctor? Though I suppose a Minister of Health might be more of an administrator than a doctor). Ancient Egyptian society was quite hierarchichal and there were a variety of different titles and ranks for doctors, which cannot be easily sorted out or matched with our modern categories.

Did Ancient Egyptian medicine warrant the name? That is, was it scientific? Well, while doctors were often a special sort of priest, and much of their practice involved their religious beliefs and sympathetic magic, there was indeed many ways in which Ancient Egyptian medicine was quite advanced for the ancient world, and admired by people from contemporary civilizations. They had no concept of the germ theory of disease, but luckily cleanliness was demanded of the priestly class and Egyptians in general bathed and purified their bodies often, and shaved their body hair as a means to fend off disease. The word for doctor is swnw (or swnwt for a woman; the suffix -t makes a word feminin, the way -e can make the feminine form of a French word) and is sometimes simplified as just the arrow symbol, indicating that doctors were initially the arrow-pullers, the people who treated those injured in battle. Compassion for the suffering was an important moral consideration as they believed they would be judged on their morality through life when they reached the afterlife. Curing a patient would increase a doctor's standing but failing to do so was not viewed as a moral failing. Both surgery and prosthetics were part of ancient Egyptian medicine. There is a beautiful relief from the Temple of Kom Ombo showing surgical instruments, but this was made thousands of years after Merit Ptah's time. The oldest surgical tools discovered are from the 6th Dynasty. (I avoided showing Merit Ptah as a surgeon since the 6th Dynasty occurred about 300 years later.) The mummification and ritual autopsy of human and animal corpses meant that ancient Egyptians had an extensive understanding of anatomy and generally managed to correctly infer the roles of major organs (though famously not the brain). They did prescribe medicines (which helps document their treatments and ancient pharmaceuticals). They are known to have used 160 distinct plant products for their medicinal uses. I think this indicates enough overlap with our own ideas about science and medicine to call Merit Ptah the earliest recorded woman in STEM (and to depict her offering medicine).


References

Merit Ptah, wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018
Méryt-Ptah (médecin dans l'Égypte antique), wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018
27th-century BC women,  wikipedia entry accessed March, 201827th-century BC women, 
Ancient Egyptian Clothing,  wikipedia entry accessed March, 2018
Ancient Egyptian Costume History, Decoration and Coloring,  Costume and fashion history. Traditional Historical clothes, accessed March 2018
Tom Tierney, Ancient Egyptian Fashions, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover. p. 2. ISBN 9780486408064.
Ancient Egyptian Medicine, wikipedia entry accessed March 2018
Ancient Egyptian Medicine, from Ancient Egypt Online, accessed March, 2018
Aleksandrovna, J.O and Lvovna, M.G, The Social status of physicians in Ancient Egypt. Istoriya meditsiny (History of Medicine), 2015. Vol 2, No. 1, pp. 55-71.
Histoire de la médecine en Egypte ancienne, website accessed March, 2018
J.F. Nunn, The doctor in Ancient Egypt 
John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, University of Oklahoma Press, 2002

Bruno Halioua, and Bernard Ziskind, Medicine in the Days of the Pharaohs, London Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2005. ISBN: 0674017021 9780674017023
H.W. Jansen, A History of Art, 3rd Edition, Harry N. Abrams, 1986

Wilhelm Röntgen reveals his own skeleton

First layer of my Wilhelm Röntgen linocut portrait

Wilhelm Röntgen, thermochromic linocut by Ele Willoughby

Been working on some more Röntgen prints! Wilhelm Röntgen (or Roentgen, without the umlaut), 1845-1923, the German physicist who discovered x-rays, earned the Nobel Prize for physics in 1901. I've depicted him at work, studying this mysterious, newly discovered, invisible form of light, based on a photograph of him in his lab, using a Crookes tube to produce x-rays. The form of the print mimics the nature of his discovery - much as x-rays reveal the skeleton within, the thermochromic ink in which Wilhelm Röntgen is printed dispears when heated to reveal his skeleton below!

Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays using the Crookes tube in 1895. A Crookes tube is an early experimental electrical discharge tube, invented by English physicist William Crookes and others around 1869-1875, in which cathode rays, streams of electrons, were discovered. Despite his efforts to block the light from the tube with cardboard, during his experiments, he noticed that the invisible cathode rays (electrons) caused a fluorescent effect on a small cardboard screen painted with barium platinocyanide when it was placed close to the aluminium window in the tube. Some sort of light was passing through the opaque cardboard and Röntgen speculated that a new kind of ray might be responsible. He called these unknown rays 'x-rays'. We now know that x-rays can be produced when electrons strike a metal target, through a process called Bremsstrahlung (or 'the braking of radiation'). During further tests of the interaction of these rays with metals, he saw the image of his own ghostly skeleton on the barium platinocyanide screen. Within two weeks he had taken the first x-ray photograph: an image of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, inventing the entire field of radiology and medical imaging!

Thermochromic ink changes colour with temperature. If you heat the print above about 30°C ( 86 F) Röntgen will go colourless and disappear, to reveal his skeleton. By using, for instance, a hair dryer, it's possible to see Röntgen's skeleton. It's a metaphor for x-rays!

Sometimes #printmaking makes me feel like a mad #scientist! I printed my portrait of Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923) who discovered x-rays in #thermochromic ink! The bench and Crookes tube, his apparatus are in regular ink. So when I heat the #print with a hair dryer #röntgen reveals his #skeleton as the ink turn colourless. He rapidly reappears when I let the print cool. #histsci #histstm #physics #xrays #roentgen #sciart

A post shared by Ele Willoughby (@the.minouette) on Mar 2, 2018 at 6:23am PST

Niels Bohr, the Bohr-Rutherford atom and Balmer series, take 2

Niels Bohr, 2nd edition, 11" x 17" linocut print, 2018 by Ele Willoughby

I've just printed a new edition of my portrait of quantum physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962). One of his most famous contributions to quantum mechanics was the Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom. Bohr is shown next to the Bohr model of the Hydrogen atom (all the concentric circles are actually at the appropriate spacing, proportional to the n squared, which probably reflects on my sanity in some way). Bohr proposed that the orbits of electrons were somewhat like planetary orbits (though circular, and at specific quantized distances). To explain how orbitting charged electrons didn't lose energy and annihilate spectacularly with the so-called "spiral death" (physicists are big on melodrama, I'm telling you), he stipulated that perhaps they simply weren't allowed anywhere but the specific orbits. They could lower their energy state if excited by falling to a lower orbit, giving off a specific photon of a specific colour related to the difference between energy levels. This also explained how the spectra of gases had distinct, thin, spectral lines. I've illustrated this with the Balmer series - because it is composed of lines which are visible to the eye (H-alpha is red and caused by a jump from the 3rd to 2nd orbit; H-beta is cyan and caused by a jump from the 4th to 2nd orbit; H-gamma is indigo and caused by a jump from the 5th to 2nd orbit; and H-delta is violet and caused by a jump from the 6th to 2nd orbit). I've shown both the quantum jumps (squiggly arrows - squiggly lines are tradition for photons) and by the line spectrum below Bohr.

Confession: In the first edition, the model of the atom was behind him. It turns out that if your four year old beloved son/tyrant wakes you in the middle of the night and keeps you up for some time, you probably aren't with it enought to try and print a 6 colour linocut with a tricky registration. I didn't change this print based on an aesthetic decision. I simply messed up the layout but decided to run with it. I decided I like it this way.

The Matchbook Project Cabinet of Curiosities

 

 

I am really pleased to be invited to take part in the The Matchbook Project, especially since the theme this year is Cabinet of Curiosities. This is a group travelling exhibit/artist exchange where all the participating artists make 10 tiny boxes (3" x 2" x 1") and their contents. You can see images of previous works in this project here or follow the #inventoryofmemorymatchbox hashtag on Instagram. Artists may decide to have similar matchbox covers and differing contents, but I decided to make similar contents and different covers.

I returned to the idea of the two-headed turtle, for something which is both an example of natural history and something extraordinary which might fit in your wonderkammer. I carved two matching lino blocks for the turtle from above with the top of its shell and the turtle from below with the bottom of its shell and printed these on Japanese cardstock. Then I printed the shell itself on many different washi papers so I cold collage each section of the shell seperately.

I made the matchboxes themselves from Japanese cardstock in assorted colours, textures and sometimes with inclusions like gold and silver foil or silk fibres. Then I made assorted tiny pillows on which the polycephaly (two-headed turtle) specimen could rest. These were made in red silk or patterned cotton with a Japanese motif or botanical drawings (which fit with the cabinet of curiosity theme).

 

I collaged each of the boxes with all the bits of prints and proofs I've been saving so long: turtles on assorted washi, insect wings on delicate tissue, crystals on irridescent paper, beetles on washi, bees, radiolarians, fossils, mushrooms, butterflies and tiny vintage tarot cards from a beautiful sheet of paper I bought in Amsterdam many years ago.

  

I had so much fun making these I think I'll make more. I'm planning to list a mystery box in my shop, so that you can purchase one and have the contents be a surprise!

Chemist Alice Ball, chaulmoogra and the first effective method for treating leprosy

Alice Ball, 11" x 14", linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2018, shows the chemist, branches of the chaulmoogra tree and
how she formed the ethyl ester of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester with water)

Leprosy is a disfiguring disease which has afflicted people for millenia. Though her work was stolen and she died tragically young, we now recognize Alice Ball, the young black woman chemist, for her discovery of the first effective treatment for leprosy just over a century ago. Today we know that leprosy (or Hansen's disease) is a long-term infection of bacterium Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis, which can usually be treated with a mix of modern antibiotics. It's likely however that leprosy is as old as human history and descriptions of the symptoms of the disease appear in ancient texts, including Hippocrates (460 BCE) and the Hindu scripture the Atharva Veda from 2,000 BCE. Signs of the disease have been found in skeletal remains from 2,000 BCE. Those infected may not show symptoms for as many as 5 to 20 years, which hindered our understanding of how it was transmitted. Sufferers develop inflammation of the nerves, respiratory track, skin and eyes, as well as skin lesions and can loose the sensation of pain in those areas. This puts them in danger of loosing extremities as repeated injuries, wounds and infection can go unnoticed. People wrongly feared that leprosy was highly contagious, and quarantined the infected in "leper colonies," a practice which persists in some developing countries. There has been significant social stigma associated with the disease, which disproportionately afflicts those living in poverty and and the term "leper" for a person affected with leprosy. Jack London in The Cruise of the Snark described a Hawaiian leper colony as ‘the pit of hell, the most cursed place on Earth’.

In the West, the traditional treatment for leprosy, like syphilis, was mercury, which is of course poisonous. In traditional Indian and Chinese medicine, the oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree (Hydnocarpus wightianus) was used as a treatment. While the oil did indeed combat the disease, it could not be effectively applied. As early as the 1300s, people tried applying chaulmoogra oil topically but it was too sticky. The acrid oil usually lead to vomiting when taken orally. Since it is viscous and can't dissolve in water (or blood), when injected it merely clumped under the skin and the patients were left with rows of oily blisters, with skin resembling bubble wrap. The painful injections were described as "burning like fire through the skin." This partial and flawed, disfiguring treatment for a disfiguring disease was adopted in Western medicine in the 19th century and there were no better options until a 23 year old chemist, Alice Ball was recruited to study chaulmoogra oil in 1915.

Alice Augusta Ball (July 24, 1892 - December 31, 1916) was one of four children in a middle to upper-middle class, black family in Seattle. Her father was a newspaper editor, photographer, and a lawyer, her mother was a photographer and her grandfather was a famous photographer. As such, she grew up around chemicals and the magic of chemistry. The family moved to Honolulu while she was a girl, because they hoped it would help with her grandfather's arthritis, but he died shortly thereafter and they returned to Seattle. Ball studied chemistry at the University of Washington, earning a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and a second degree in pharmacy two years later. She published "Benzoylations in Ether Solution," in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society with her pharmacy instructor, at a time when it was quite an unusual accomplishment for any woman, let alone a woman of colour, to publish in the peer review literature. She was offered various scholarships and opted to return to Hawaii to pursue her master's in chemistry, investigating the active principle of Piper methysticum (a medicinal plant known as kava  or ʻawa). She was both the first woman and the first African American to graduate with a master's degree from the University of Hawai'i. She also became the first Black chemistry professor at the school.

Island of Molokai where people diagnosed with leprosy were held
was once known as the "Land of Living Death."
Albert Pierce Taylor (1922) Under Hawaiian Skies: A Narrative of the Romance,
Adventure and History of the Hawaiian Islands, Board of Education of the
Hawaiian Kingdom, Page 348, Public Domain, Link

From 1866 to 1942, people diagnosed with leprosy in Hawai'i were arrested and quarantined on the Island of Molokai. Physician Dr. Harry T. Hollmann of the Kalihi Hospital in Hawai'i and acting director of the Kalihi leprosy clinic, was unsatisfied with using chaulmoogra oil in its natural form to treat leprosy patients and wanted to isolate the active ingredients. He recruited the graduate student Ball to help. Within a year, she was able to do what chemists and pharmacologists had been unable to do for centuries. She not only isolated the active ingredients but convert them to a form which could be circulated in the body. By taking the fatty acids present in the oil and exposing them to an alcohol and a catalyst, she produce ethyl esters which are soluble in water, and hence could effectively be injected. My print shows how she formed the ethyl ester of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester with water). This breakthrough was so significant, she was offered an instructor position in chemistry at the university. By 1922, her method was widely used to prepare chaulmoogra oil, and patients would might have been subjected to exile, a life of regular painful injections and being trapped in quarantine were instead being effectively cured and discharged!

Tragically, Ball did not live to see the affects of her research. She became ill during her research and returned to Seattle for treatment. She may have been exposed to chlorine gas while demonstrating the use of a gas mask in case of attack (as WWI was raging), but the cause of her death is unknown. Her death certificate was altered and lists tuberculosis as the cause of death, at age 24. She had yet to publish her results when she met her untimely death.

The chemist and president of the University of Hawaii, Arthur L. Dean completed and published her study - but he did not give Ball credit for her work, calling it the "Dean Method"! Dr. Hollmann objected and published an article documenting how the technique should in fact be known as the "Ball Method". The Ball Method relieved the thousands of patients removed from the homes in Hawai'i, forcing their families to hold funerals before their exile. Ball's Method was the preferred treatment for Hansen's disease until the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s. Despite Hollmann's efforts to defend her legacy, Ball's achievements did not receive much recognition until historians learned of and highlighted her work in the 1970s. Almost 90 years after her discovery, the University of Hawai'i finally recognized her work with a plaque on the school's lone chaulmoogra tree in 2000, and the Lieutenant Governor  declared February 29 "Alice Ball Day," now celebrated every four years.


Sources:
Esther Inglis-Arkell, "We Had A Cure For Leprosy For Centuries, But Couldn't Get It To Work", io9, 5/08/15 1:40pm 
"Ball, Alice Augusta," ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa, accessed February 7, 2018
"Alice Ball", "Hydnocarpus wightianus", and "Leprosy," Wikipedia, accessed February 7, 2018
"Meet Alice Ball - The pharmaceutical Chemist who developed the first effective treatment for Leprosy," Women Rock Science http://womenrockscience.tumblr.com, December 3, 2013 
"Alice Ball and the Fight against Leprosy," blue stocking, Posted on February 29, 2016 by Mona
"UWSOP alumni legend Alice Ball, class of 1914, solved leprosy therapy riddle," University of Washington School of Pharmacy,
February 13, 2017
Ignotofsky, Rachel (2016). "Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World" Ten Speed Press: pp.45

Antoine-Laurent and Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier as The Lovers

Antoine et Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, linocut with collaged washi,
2018 by Ele Willoughby

All too often history of science, or the history of science as retold by scientists, neglects to mention women. One of the things I want to do with my series of prints about the history of science is put those excluded back into the story. Sometimes, the missing women are hiding in plain sight! Invited to create a piece inspired by the Lovers tarot card, I thought of French scientists Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794) and his wife Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (20 January 1758 – 10 February 1836). Lavoisier is often referred to as the 'father' of modern chemistry, without any reference to his wife. Though many will be familiar with a image of the two, doing chemistry together. Their close friend, famed neo-Classical painter Jacques Louis David painted his Portrait of Anoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife in 1788. He also trained Marie-Anne Paulze in drawing and engraving, allowing her to accurately illustrate their experiements. And she most definitely appears in her own drawings and engravings documenting their work.

I hope considering them as a true (and loving team) is a more modern day interpretation of love and their history, as well as a more complete and accurate look at the development of chemistry. The couple, working closely together, modernized and quantified chemistry and the scientific method, recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen, explained the role that oxygen plays in combustion, helped modernize chemical nomenclature and discovered that mass is conserved in chemical reactions. While this has traditionally been described simply as Lavoisier's work modern scholarship points out that Paulze translated all his contemporaries, like Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish's manuscripts from English or Latin to French, took notes of all observations, illustrated all experimental set-ups, edited his reports and worked so closely with him we can't easily separate their roles. Perhaps most importantly, her translation of Richard Kirwan's 'Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids' with her own footnotes pointing out all the errors in chemistry, convinced her husband to perform their own experiments, which ultimately disproved the popular but incorrect ideas about "phlogiston" (the supposed fire-like element released by substances during combustion) championed by George Stahl, and lead to the discovery of oxygen. Attributing everything to him alone is clearly not the full picture.

Portrait of Anoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wifeBy Jacques-Louis David - Metropolitan Museum of Art, online database:
entry 436106 (accession number: 1977.10), Public Domain, Link

While clearly a devoted couple, their history as lovers is a bit complicated, especially looking back with modern eyes. They married in 1771, when Lavoisier was about 28 and Paulze was merely 13! Child marriage is a horrifying prospect and remains a scourge today, but Lavoisier was in fact recruited by Marie-Anne's father Jacques Paulze to rescue her. Both men gained most of their income from the Ferme Générale (the General Farm), a private consortium which paid the Crown for the priviledge of gathering certain taxes. A powerful nobel and member of the consortium, the 50-year-old Count d'Amerval made a formal proposal of marriage to the 13 year old Marie-Anne Paulze, who considered him "a fool, an unfeeling rustic, and an ogre". Wishing to protect her from such a fate, Paulze asked his friend Lavoisier to marry her instead. He agreed, and the couple settled down at the Arsenal in Paris, where he was able to further pursue his growing interest in chemistry and build a state-of-the-art lab. Marie-Anne became interested in these scientific pursuits and soon joined him in the lab. She received formal training in the field from his friends and colleagues Jean Baptiste Michel Bucquet and Philippe Gingembre, and the couple spent most of their time in the lab. Marie-Anne also famously hosted scientific salons with luminaries of the day.

Work Lavoisier undertook to help fund their research, including his role with the Ferme Générale and the tobacco commission, tragically lead to his execution during the French Revolution. She fought to defend his legacy after he was executed. She organized and arranged for the publication of his Mémoires de chimie, including a preface she wrote attacking the revolutionairies she blamed for her husband's death. The book was published by her former lover P.S. du Pont; the idea that the successful marriage and partnership of the Lavoisiers could survive a 10 year affair (1781-1791) with du Pont is quite foreign to modern eyes, but there was little controversy when French nobles of the time took a lover. In fact, when Lavoisier died, her entrusted his wife to his friend du Pont's care. Due to the upheaval of the times, du Pont was unable to repay the money he borrowed from her for his printing venture, and she pursued her financial claim against him and his son for years. The du Ponts moved to the United States, prospered*, repaid their dept and finally published Lavoisier's memoirs of chemistry.

This engraving by Mme Lavoisier shows one of their experiments in human respiration. She is clearly the one recording their data and documenting the experimental set-up on the right.

This drawing by Mme Lavoisier shows one of their experiments in human respiration. She is clearly the one recording their data and documenting the experimental set-up on the right.

Mme Lavoisier kept his name for the rest of her life, even during her short-lived second marriage to physicist Sir Benjamin Thomson, Count Rumford. She dumped Rumford as soon as she realized that he did not intend for her to work alongside him in the lab, or respect her Independence as she was accustomed. One of the best physicists of the day who revolutionized our understanding of heat, Thomson fled the U.S., abandoning his first wife after supporting the British side during the American Revolution. He was knighted by George III and made a count after moving to Bavaria, by the Holy Roman Empire. After the death of his estranged wife, he was attracted to the wealthy widow Paulze-Lavoisier, who travelled in the best scientific circles, and saw her wealth as a means of funding his research. Despite a four-year courtship, they soon found they were a bad match. They married in 1805 and separated in 1809.**

I draw on a variety of the aspects of historical tarot cards in my print. I've included the word "L'Amoureux" in French, for this French couple. I chose them, not only as a loving historical scientific couple, but because the card is associated with flames and the element of air. The Lavoisiers studied air and were the ones who really showed that air was not an element (in the modern chemical sense) by isolating various constituent gases like oxygen, and debunking the earlier phlogiston theory. I have specifically shown them with their famous phlogiston experiment apparatus. Further, not only did they recognize the role that oxygen played in combustion, Lavoisier and his friend Pierre-Simon Laplace also recognized that the process of respiration was in fact a slow, controlled combustion - hence the image of the lungs with flames (which is also an allusion to the flaming heart symbol and iconography).

The prints are 7.5" x 12.5" with an image area of 5" x 8.3". Each are printed on Japanese kozo paper, with collaged pink lungs and patterned vest.

As a printmaker, documenting the history of science with relief prints, I love that Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier also documented science with relief prints.

* His son Éleuthère, trained by Lavoisier as a chemist, opened a gun-powder manufacturing plant which ultimately became one of the biggest and most successful US companies, DuPont.

**One famous story about the ill-fated Rumford-Lavoisier marriage: annoyed that she had invited many guests without seeking his permission he locked their gate and removed the key. So, she spoke with her guests through the gate and then poured boiling water on his prized flowers. (see 'Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century' by Marlene and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham).

NEVER COME BETWEEN A SCIENTIFIC LADY AND HER SALON.