Conrad Khunrath

Conrad Khunrath (1555, Leipzig -1613, probably in Hamburg) was a German merchant, alchemist, mint worker, doctor, author, editor, and translator. He is particularly important as the author of Medulla destillatoria, a work of Paracelsian iatrochemistry which was published in many editions for well over a century.

Life

Conrad Khunrath was born around 1555 to the Leipzig merchant Sebastian Kunrat and his wife Anna. He had at least ten younger siblings, among them Heinrich Khunrath, who became known as an alchemist in his own right. By 1562, Conrad, still a child, had enrolled at Leipzig University, though this seems to have been only pro forma. In his youth, Conrad traveled around England where he learned the English language. He is known to have worked as a merchant from 1580; after the death of his father, Conrad also took over the cloth and vitriol trade. Subsequently, Khunrath expanded his professional activities into medical practice. His medications relied on spagyric or alchemical processes he developed himself.

By 1594, Khurath resided in Schleswig. There he published the first edition of his magnum opus Medulla destillatoria, as well as a number of ancillary works and later editions. From about 1606 Khunrath worked as coin controller for the mint in Hamburg, managing the upheavals of the Kipper und Wipper financial crisis. He died, probably in Hamburg, shortly before 6 May 1613.[1]

Two years after his death, another part of the Medulla destillatoria was published.

Selected works
As author
As editor or translator
gollark: > In practice, on limited keyboards of the day, source programs often used the sequences $( and $) in place of the symbols { and }UTTER apiaristicaloids.
gollark: Please provide information on your "Doku"Wiki install.
gollark: > gollark the latex plugin broke my dokuwikiBroke how?
gollark: > The interpretation of any value was determined by the operators used to process the values. (For example, + added two values together, treating them as integers; ! indirected through a value, effectively treating it as a pointer.) In order for this to work, the implementation provided no type checking. Hungarian notation was developed to help programmers avoid inadvertent type errors.[citation needed] This is *just* like Sinth's idea of Unsafe.
gollark: > The language is unusual in having only one data type: a word, a fixed number of bits, usually chosen to align with the architecture's machine word and of adequate capacity to represent any valid storage address. For many machines of the time, this data type was a 16-bit word. This choice later proved to be a significant problem when BCPL was used on machines in which the smallest addressable item was not a word but a byte or on machines with larger word sizes such as 32-bit or 64-bit.[citation needed]

References

Notes
  1. See Max Bahrfeldt, ed., Niedersächsisches Münzarchiv, vol. IV (Halle/Saale, 1930), 106, 122, 248.

Bibliography
  • Humberg, Oliver. Der Alchemist Conrad Khunrath: Texte und Dokumente aus Leipzig, Schleswig und Hamburg mit Studien zu Leben, Werk und Familiengeschichte. Quellen und Forschungen zur Alchemie, 2. Elberfeld, 2006.
  • Moller, Johannes. Cimbria literata II, 439. Copenhagen, 1744.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.