Girtanner, Christoph

(b. St. Gall, Switzerland, 7 December 1760; d. Göttingen, Germany, 17 May 1800)

medicine, chemistry.

Girtanner’s father, Hieronymus, was a banker; his mother, Barbara Felicitas, was the daughter of the burgomaster Christoph Wegelin. He studied first at Lausanne and then at Göttingen where he obtained his doctorate in 1782 with a thesis on chalk, quicklime, and the matter of fire. He studied pediatrics at St. Gall, and then visited Paris, Edinburgh, and London before returning to Göttingen in 1787, the year he met Georg Lichtenberg. After further travels in 1788–1789, he settled in Göttingen, and in 1793 became a privy councillor to the duke of Saxe-Coburg. In 1790 he had married Catherine Maria Erdmann; their two sons both became naturalists. Girtanner was of a contentious disposition and published antirevolutionary works.

Girtanner was attracted by the Brunonian theory and studied Lavoisier’s work on oxygen which he believed might be the principle of irritability. In 1790 he suggested this possibility in Rozier’s Observations sur la physique and was accused of plagiarizing John Brown. He then wrote critical expositions of the views of Brown and of Erasmus Darwin. Meanwhile he had also published a book on pediatrics and another on venereal disease, arguing forcibly for the American origin of syphilis.

Girtanner was an early convert to Lavoisier’s doctrines, and in 1791 published the first German version of the new chemical nomenclature. But his term for nonacidic oxides, Halbsäure, proved unacceptable, and his scheme for distinguishing such acids as sulfuric and sulfurous was unsuccessful. In 1792 he published his Anfangsgründe der antiphlogistischen Chemie, a textbook modeled upon Lavoisier’s, which saw three editions and was used by Berzelius. According to Lavoisier, muriatic acid (hydrogen chloride) must, like all acids, be an oxide. Girtanner thought he had proved it to be an oxide of hydrogen, and nitrogen another oxide which could be prepared from steam. But unlike contemporary Germans who believed that water was thus proved the basis of all gases, he refused to accept that his experiments entailed a return to the phlogiston principle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Girtanner’s writings include Dissertatio inauguralis chemica de Terra Calcarea cruda et calcinata (Göttingen, 1782); Abhandlung über die venerische Krankheit, 3 vols. (Göttingen, 1788–1789), in which the first vol. is practical, the others bibliographical; “Mémoires sur l’irritabilité,” in Observations sur la physique, 36 (1790) 422; 37 (1790), 139; Neue chemische Nomenklatur für die Deutsche Sprache (Berlin 1791); Anfangsgründe der antiphlogistischen Chemie (Berlin, 1792; 2nd ed., 1795; 3rd ed., 1801); Abhandlung über die Krankheiten der Kinder... (Berlin, 1794), Italian trans., 2 vols. (Genoa, 1801); Ueber das Kantische Prinzip für die Naturgeschichte... (Göttingen 1796); Ausfürliche Darstellung des Brownischen Systemes der praktischen Heilkunde ..., 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1797–1798); Russian trans., Iogona brovno sistema, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1806–1807); Ausfürliche Darstellung des Darwinischen Systemes der praktischen Heilkunde..., 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1799); “Sur l’analyse de l’azote,” in Annales de chimie, 33 (1799), 229–231; 36 (1800) 3–40; a trans is in Philosophical Magazine, 6 (1800), 152–153, 216–217, 335–354.

II. Secondary Literature. For works about Girtanner, see M. P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (London, 1962), pp. 207–210; G. W. A. Kahlbaum and A. Hoffman, Die Einführung der Lavoisierischen Theorie im Besonderen in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1897); Neue deutsche Biographie, VI (Berlin, 1964), 411–412; and J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, III (London, 1962), 589–590.

David M. Knight