Allen G. Debus
| Allen G. Debus | |
|---|---|
Allen Debus, 2006
|
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| Born |
August 16, 1926 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | March 6, 2009 (aged 82) Deerfield, Illinois |
| Nationality | United States |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Northwestern University, Indiana University, Harvard |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Historian of Science, Historian of Chemistry |
Allen George Debus (August 16, 1926 – March 6, 2009) was an American historian of science, known primarily for his work on the history of chemistry and alchemy. In 1991 he was honored at the University of Chicago with an academic conference held in his name. Paul H. Theerman and Karen Hunger Parshall edited the proceedings, and Debus contributed his autobiography of which this article is a digest.
Allen Debus attended the Evanston public school system where he showed an early interest in history. A great aunt passed on her legacy of an epoch of music to him in the form of a 1908 Victrola and a record collection up to 1923. Due to the topical material and dialect songs, he wrote "studying this music gave me an opportunity early on to place past events in their historical context". In the contextual approach to history, developments should be compared across fields, and this is a feature of the school of Alexandre Koyre, I. Bernard Cohen, and Walter Pagel, the latter two being teachers of Debus.
Debus studied chemical engineering and history, graduating with a major in chemistry in the summer of 1947 from Northwestern University. He pursued his master's degree at Indiana University where he had followed John J. Murray. In June 1949 he presented his master’s thesis Robert Boyle and Chemistry in England 1660-1700 under John J. Murray. Subsequently, he worked towards a master’s in chemistry at the same institution. He went to work for Abbott Laboratories, a company for which he filed five patents. He wrote that slow reaction times for some of his work provided reading time for broader investigations in history of science and chemistry literature. In fall 1956 he began his Ph.D. studies at Harvard under I. Bernard Cohen. His teaching assistant work was supervised by Leonard K. Nash. In a seminar with W. K. Jordan he presented a paper on the English followers of Paracelsus which received the Bowdoin Prize in the Natural Sciences, the first of two from his years at Harvard. In September 1959 he went to London, England to delve more deeply into the topic. There he met regularly with Walter Pagel and attended University College of London courses given by Douglas McKie. Returning to Harvard, he completed the requirements for a Harvard Ph.D. in history of science.
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