Distillations magazine

A conversation on the weapon salve, a sensational cure.

In early modern Europe, collecting was a way to press order on a world made increasingly strange.

Why do we still study the color of urine?

In a society that damned women for both plainness and adornment, wearing makeup became a defiant act of survival.

The pirate-turned-naturalist-turned-pirate-again inspired generations of British writers and scientists.

The tricks and tools book sleuths use to date the undated.

What a manuscript can tell us about an iconic scientist and the history we’ve built around him.

How searching for alchemy’s secrets helped create modern science.

The clues that betray a book’s disreputable past.

Historian Bruce Moran reveals the life of an itinerant doctor whose work influenced modern science.

When New York’s poor revolted against the city’s grave-robbing medical establishment.

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows how power and science were intertwined in early modern Europe.

An engraving hints at the ways art and science were intertwined in the Age of Enlightenment.

An ancient work on toxicology gets a 16th-century makeover from a master of fonts.

Alchemists once wrote of chaos, dragons, and spirits, but did they know more about chemistry than we give them credit for?

A manuscript reveals the mark a mysterious American alchemist made on Isaac Newton and other early chemists.

Doctors battle for supremacy in the 17th century.

Watch historians re-create a recipe for imitation coral, a popular material in early modern jewelry and home décor.