PZ Myers. 2005 Jan 06. Science as the contemplation of a bottle of pee. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/science_as_the_contemplation_of_a_bottle_of_pee/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Thursday, January 06, 2005

Science as the contemplation of a bottle of pee

chemists

In my life, I've twice been put into short promotional clips plugging my university. Every time, the guy doing the filming does exactly the same thing: he tells me to hold a flask or a test tube of colored water up and peer wisely at it. I don't think I've ever done such a thing in the lab, but what can you do? It's the conventional image of the scientist (I've also had to pose in two other stereotypical scenes: looking into a microscope, and standing at a chalkboard. At least I do do those things.)

So it was interesting to see a very brief note in this week's Nature on the origin of the archetypal image of the chemist.. It's a pose hallowed by over 700 years of history!

So where does the pose come from? As Joachim Schummer and Tami Spector pointed out at a recent conference in Paris on the public image of chemistry, the answer lies in the image in the top left. This appeared in a book dating from 1283, the Latin translation of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, and shows not a chemist but a doctor. The flask contains not a solution synthesized by alchemy but a sample of a patient's urine—diagnoses were typically made by uroscopy, the practice of inspecting the urine for colour, clarity and other qualities.

When Paracelsus introduced chemistry into medicine (so-called iatrochemistry) in the early seventeenth century, this image of the gazed-at flask transferred itself from medicine to 'chymistry', and subsequently became so much a part of the subject's visual language that it is alive and well today.

At least none of the photographers expected me to wear that ugly brown dress in our sessions.

Dr William Kimler pointed me to a much nicer picture of the standard pose:

image

It really makes me want to go to work wearing my bathrobe and a cape. We have rather lost our sense of style in lab attire, haven't we?

Posted by PZ Myers on 01/06 at 10:04 AM
History • Science • 2 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
  1. As a synthetic chemist I can safely say that yes we do lift up the occasional flask and peer at it with our chemical brains working away feverishly.

    Normally we are wondering how we have managed to turn pure, white, crystalline starting materials and reagents in clear, colourless, distilled solvent into a kind of brown/black shit (a technical chemical word) that has not one trace of the desired product in it.

    Look into the eyes of the archetypal chemist staring at a flask and it won't be wisdom you'll see. It'll be pain and confusion over whether or not that stuff you can smell is toxic or not!
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  10:45 AM
  2. My favorite scientist media moment is from the old ABC Spider-Man cartoons. In one of the shows, and I have no idea which one, Peter Parker is concocting some sort of chemical wonder, in the way that the crew of the Enterprise manages to whip up leaps in technology as soon as an accidentally hostile energy life-form heaves into view.

    This is shown, of course, in a montage. After various Bunsen burners and flasks and bubblers flit by, the camera settles on Peter sitting at his desktop chem lab, holding a test tube in each hand. (I assume that this was second season or so under the direction of Ralph Bakshi, as he was fond of looping footage to cut down on artist detail.) He poured the colored fluid from one tube to the other, not spilling a drop, and then back into the first. And again, and again, and again, back and forth and forth and back.

    Voiceover: "Just a little more mixing..."

    That was a running joke for a couple of years of high school, that was.
    #: Posted by Linus  on  01/06  at  11:18 AM
  3. My favorite twist on this tradition is the way marketplace doctors in 17th century England were called piss-prophets.
    #: Posted by Carl Zimmer  on  01/06  at  11:34 AM
  4. "The Madness of King George" had that priceless character of the King's doctor exclaiming over dung shapes and hues of pee.

    Linus—If'n I'm not mistaken, the brown of human waste is excreted human tissue, dead cells (mostly blood) and toxins, etc.
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  11:41 AM
  5. Seems like every time we see a chemist in a movie, there is at least one flask with stuff boiling away like mad. (Probably a big chunk of dry ice in water.)
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  02:23 PM
  6. You do realize that the bottom right picture is of a young Margaret Roberts, destined to become Britain's first female Prime Minister? How could you do that to us?

    Apparently Thatcher's one published article as a chemist was a study of how to introduce more air into ice cream. Whether this served as inspiration for her economic policies in the 1980s is anyone's guess......
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  03:31 PM
  7. Several hundred years later, the guy in the bottom left is still holding a flask of urine.

    And by the looks of how he's holding it, it appears to be a very warm sample.
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  03:44 PM
  8. I've never been roped into posing for one of those pictures, but it's only a matter of time. I've seen some publicity photos for our institution that included a scientist not only peering into a flask of colored water, but standing in front of a shelf lined with flasks of different-colered solutions.
    #: Posted by Orac  on  01/06  at  04:08 PM
  9. I did the one where I was peering at an optical table with a pretty green laser on it. The photographer asked to do what I would do when I was working; when I informed him that that was staring at a computer screen he said that wasn't good enough. So I asked what he wanted: "Do what you do when you're working."

    This went on for a while. If figured if he wanted to pose me, go ahead and pose me. Sheesh.
    #: Posted by Evan Murdock  on  01/06  at  04:29 PM
  10. Here's another scientific cliche for pictures: Having a scientist looking at an autoradiograph, either by holding it up to the light or hanging it on a lightbox. I once had a very senior scientist ask me if I could loan him a Western blot from my lab to use for just such a purpose.

    Of course, because I wear two hats (scientist and clinician), I would point out that there are doctor cliches as well. Looking at an X-ray of some kind is a common one. Listening to a patient's chest with a stethoscope is another.
    #: Posted by Orac  on  01/06  at  05:16 PM
  11. “The Madness of King George” had that priceless character of the King’s doctor exclaiming over dung shapes and hues of pee.

    And of course you will recall the Chinese doctor in The Last Emperor, sniffing at the young Last Emperor's stool and ordering more beans. Clearly this is no cultural construct but Objective Truth.
    #: Posted by Mrs Tilton  on  01/06  at  06:23 PM
  12. Is that a bedpan in the picture?
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  08:54 PM
  13. No, in The Last Emperor , it was "No meat for two days!" after handling and sniffing the scat.

    But, to stand up for urology, not to long ago urine color and clarity were actually very useful in medical diagnosis. These days microscopy is used to identify objects like crystals and casts.

    Hey PZ, I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell you how much I enjoy this blog as well as Mr. Zimmers. I've been visiting you both for a little over a month and it's been great to read such a variety of postings on topics like this. Keep up the good work!
    #: Posted by  on  01/06  at  09:34 PM
  14. This sure is a classic. One summer when I was a postdoc in Amsterdam, the refuse collectors went on strike for several weeks. It was pretty hot and soon, pretty smelly, so the media came to film in our microbiology department for a story on potential health hazards. We duly set up a shaking table on which were several flasks of food colouring solutions. They were pretty happy with that. I made my only, brief appearance on film, streaking some petri plates.

    I concur - no more Thatcher pictures please, the memories are still painful. Many of you may know that she was a student of the great crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, Britain's only female Nobel laureate.
    #: Posted by Neil  on  01/06  at  09:40 PM
  15. The guy in the painting looks like Will Millar, formerly of the Irish Rovers.
    http://www.celtic-music.com/yerman.htm
    #: Posted by tim gueguen  on  01/06  at  11:13 PM
  16. No, in The Last Emperor , it was “No meat for two days!” after handling and sniffing the scat.

    Interesting. Unless my memory is treacherous (always a distinct possibility), in the German version, which is what I saw, it was 'mehr Bohnen'. Probably because Hitler was a vegetarian. Or something.
    #: Posted by Mrs Tilton  on  01/07  at  06:30 AM
  17. Mrs Tilton: See, if the old paperhanger had followed Ted Nugent's advice and gotten up to his elbows in a gut pile twice a year we could have avoided WW II, and Neville would still be respected.
    #: Posted by  on  01/07  at  09:12 AM