Teodor Teofil Matecki, Polish Chemical Vocabulary [1855]

Title: Polish Chemical Vocabulary.

Author: Teodor Teofil Matecki (M.D., Ph.D.)

Publisher: Published by Jan Konstanty Żupański, Poznań

Year of publication: 1855.

Format: 24 cm.

Number of pages: 144

Binding: Paperback, paper cover, standard publication format.

In the mid-19th century, the development of Polish chemical terminology was both an urgent and contentious task—science was advancing rapidly, and the Polish scientific language, divided among the three partitions, lacked a single center that could impose standard terms. "Polish Chemical Vocabulary," published in Poznań in 1855, is a proposal put forward by the Greater Poland region, created just two years after the Kraków "Polish Chemical Vocabulary" by Emilian Czyrniański (1853) and in parallel with the work being done in Warsaw. Studies on the history of Polish scientific terminology mention Matecki’s book precisely in this context—as the voice of the Poznań center, which, unlike Kraków and Warsaw, did not develop its own terminological “school.” The year of publication falls during the period of Prussian partition in Greater Poland, a few years after the Spring of Nations, when work on the Polish language of science was one of the ways of maintaining the continuity of national culture. The publisher was Jan Konstanty Żupański, a Poznań bookseller and publisher, one of the most important publishers of Polish scientific and literary works in the Grand Duchy of Poznań.

The dictionary was compiled by a physician, not a professional chemist. Teodor Teofil Matecki (1810–1886), a native of Poznań who also died there, attended St. Mary Magdalene Gymnasium, the city’s oldest secondary school, but interrupted his studies to take part in the November Uprising; He then studied medicine in Wrocław, earning his medical degree in 1837, and after an internship in Berlin, he settled in Poznań in 1838 as a practicing physician. In 1846, he was arrested for conspiratorial activities related to preparations for the Greater Poland Uprising and was successively imprisoned in Poznań, Sonnenburg, Hausvogtei, and Moabit, where he was sentenced to six years in a fortress —he was freed by the Berlin Revolution of 1848, after which he organized the medical services for the Greater Poland Uprising and established hospitals in Śrem, Września, and Miłosław, while also serving on the National Committee in Poznań. He was a co-founder of the Poznań Bazaar, a member of the Poznań Society of Friends of Science, and the author of numerous articles on medicine, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. He fought successive cholera epidemics (1848, 1849, 1852, 1866), and in 1859 he was among those who initiated the erection of a monument to Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań.

Provenance: On the title page is a “Biblioteka Jan Zawidzki” ownership stamp, indicating a possible connection between this piece and the library of Jan Zawidzki (1866–1928), a chemist and professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, who worked, among other things, on the Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Polish Chemists. For a book devoted to Polish chemical nomenclature, it would be difficult to find a more fitting owner, although this identity should be treated as probable rather than confirmed by documentation.

This volume will be of interest to historians of science and language, chemists interested in the history of their own discipline, and collectors of 19th-century prints from Greater Poland.

The paper publisher’s binding is in a state of disintegration; the first two pages are loose from the block. The block is loose; the first twenty pages have visible damage to the lower corner; the paper has numerous natural spots; and the edges and corners of the pages are frayed. This piece requires bookbinding restoration.

Catalog ID: 9975-24-A-X