translate the next text to spanish, ignoring the bibliograpgy and references: The laboratory has a long history. Originally it was the workshop of an (al)
chemist or an apothecary, where medicines were prepared or other chemical
substances were made. In the seventeenth century several universities
in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and some other Western European
countries established chemical laboratories within their faculties of medicine
that complemented anatomical theatres and botanical gardens as teaching
facilities for students of medicine. In several instances the lectures on
chemistry took place in the private laboratory of the professors. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term ‘laboratory’ was used
almost exclusively for a place where chemical operations such as distillation
were performed.2
 Until the early nineteenth century, laboratories within
1 Robert E. Kohler, ‘Lab History: Reflections’, Isis, 99 (2008), 761-68.
2 The only exception we are aware of is Leiden University, where the Theatrum physicum
was also called Laboratorium physicum in several eighteenth-century sources. See: Cornelis de
The Joint Em ergence of the Teaching-Research Laboratory 15
the universities were in many respects similar to artisanal laboratories.
Both were dominated by fireplaces, furnaces, distillation apparatus, and
related chemical equipment.3
Here we will focus on the situation in the universities. In many of the
private and public teaching laboratories of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, chemistry professors allowed some of their students to get experience through the practice of chemistry. This was the case, for instance, in
Marburg, Utrecht, Leiden, and Glasgow. These lessons in practical chemistry
were then not part of a regular curriculum, but a favour granted—often
against payment—by the professor.4
During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a few laboratories
started to offer practical training in chemistry to far larger groups of the
students. Starting in 1779, several private pharmaceutical institutes that
offered practical courses were erected in Germany by pharmacists and
chemists such as Johann Christian Wiegleb, Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff, Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädt, and, later, Justus Liebig. During the
early decades of the nineteenth century, several of these institutes became
integrated into the local university.5
Pater, ‘Experimental physics’, in Th.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds.,
Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden: Universitaire
Pers Leiden/ E.J. Brill, 1975), pp. 308–27, esp. pp. 315, 318-19, 321-22.
3 Frederic L. Holmes, Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise (Berkeley,
CA: Office for History of Science and Technology, 1989); Ernst Homburg, ‘The Rise of Analytical
Chemistry and its Consequences for the Development of the German Chemical Profession
(1780–1860)’, Ambix, 46 (1999), 1–32; Ursula Klein, ‘Die technowissenschaftlichen Laboratorien der
Frühen Neuzeit’, NTM, 16 (2008), 5–38; Ursula Klein, ‘The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions
of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation’, Isis, 99, 769–82; Ursula Klein, ‘Chemical
and Pharmaceutical Laboratories before the Professionalization of Chemistry’, in Marta C.
Lourenço and Ana Carneiro, eds., Spaces and Collections in the History of Science. The Laboratorio
Chimico Overture (Lisbon: Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon, 2009), pp. 3–12.
4 Owen Hannaway, ‘Johann Conrad Barchusen (1666–1723) – Contemporary and Rival of
Boerhaave’, Ambix, 14 (1967), 96–111; Frederic Lawrence Holmes, ‘Laboratory, Chemical’, in J.L.
Heilbron et al., eds., The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), pp. 441–2; Robert G.W. Anderson, ‘The Creation of the Chemistry Teaching
Laboratory’, in Lourenço and Carneiro, eds., Spaces and Collections in the History of Science,
pp. 13–23, esp. p. 14; Marieke M.A. Hendriksen and Ruben E. Verwaal, ‘Boerhaave’s Furnace.
Exploring Early Modern Chemistry through Working Models’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 43 (2020), 385–411 (pp. 392–93).
5 Dieter Pohl, ‘Zur Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Privatinstitute in Deutschland von
1779 bis 1873’ (PhD diss., Marburg, 1972); A. Wankmüller, ‘Pharmazeutische Privatinstitute und
Universitäten zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Deutsche Apotheker-Zeitung, 113 (1973), 636-39,
673-76; H.R. Abe, ‘Zur Geschichte der ersten pharmazeutischen Lehranstalten Deutschlands’,
Medicamentum (Berlin), 17 (1976), 93-95.
16 Klaas van Berkel and Er nst Homburg
At about the same time some universities and mining academies set up
chemistry courses for future mining officials and supervisors of mines.
From 1767 to 1768 a large new laboratory was erected at the University of
Uppsala for the professor of chemistry Torbern Bergman, in which excellent facilities for experimental research and for the teaching of chemistry
were combined. According to Marco Beretta, ‘Bergman’s laboratory was
attended by hundreds of students, many from foreign countries, and it soon
became a model followed outside Sweden’. It inspired chemistry teachers in
Paris and strongly influenced the 1785 renovation of the laboratory of the
important mining academy in Schemnitz in the Habsburg Empire. Other
large laboratories erected in those years were the Laboratorio Chimico of the
University of Coimbra (1772) and the chemical laboratory of the University
of Göttingen (1784), directed by Johann Friedrich Gmelin. Under Gmelin’s
successor Friedrich Stromeyer the laboratory was enlarged several times.
Stromeyer organized practical chemistry courses for growing numbers of
students, especially during the 1820s. In those years practical chemistry could
also be studied at several other German universities, and in Scotland and
England as well. Only in France would it take several decades for universities
to take over the role played by private teaching laboratories.6
Parallel to the rise of these teaching laboratories, the practice of chemistry
itself changed quite drastically. The investigation of gases (pneumatic chemistry) accelerated the introduction of physical instruments into chemistry.
Along with this, new, rather small-scale analytical chemical methods were
developed, such as the blowpipe and gravimetric and volumetric techniques.
Torbern Bergman and especially Antoine Lavoisier were the leaders of this
new approach, which brought chemistry and physics into closer mutual
contact.7
 This is illustrated by the growing number of sales catalogues
6 Marco Beretta, ‘Laboratories and Technology’, in: Matthew Daniel Eddy and Ursula Klein,
eds., A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2022), pp. 71–91, esp. pp. 84–87; Peter Konečný, ‘Sites of Chemistry in the Schemnitz Mining
Academy and the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Mining Administration’, Ambix, 60 (2013),
160–78 (pp. 169–72); Pedro Enrech Casaleiro, ‘The Restoration of the Laboratorio Chimico at the
University of Coimbra’, in Lorenço and Carneiro, eds., Spaces and Collections in the History of
Science, pp. 235–44; Lena Hoppe, Historische Stätten der Chemie: Das Göttinger Alte Chemische
Laboratorium, Göttingen, 17. Oktober 2019 (Frankfurt a.M.: Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker,
2019); Homburg, ‘The Rise of Analytical Chemistry’, pp. 9–18; Alan J. Rocke, ‘Academic Chemical
Laboratories in Paris, 1823–1894’, in Lourenço and Carneiro, eds., Spaces and Collections in the
History of Science, pp. 25–31.
7 Holmes, ‘Laboratory, Chemical’; Peter J.T. Morris, The Matter Factory. A History of the
Chemistry Laboratory (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), pp. 43–46, 58–59; Beretta, ‘Laboratories
and Technology’, pp. 82–85.
The Joint Em ergence of the Teaching-Research Laboratory 17
for chemical instruments that appeared during the early decades of the
nineteenth century. There was even a new periodical created for disseminating the innovations in laboratory instrumentation and architecture: Das
Laboratorium. Eine Sammlung von Abbildungen und Beschreibungen der
besten und neuesten Apparate zum Behuf der practischen und physicalischen
Chemie, which was published from 1825 to 1840.8
 During the early nineteenth
century this and other innovations, such as the introduction of gaslight,
would also finally revolutionize the architecture of chemical laboratories.
Whereas the laboratory between about 1600 and 1820 had remained relatively
unchanged, dominated by furnaces, a new type of laboratory emerged after
a transition period from 1820 to 1850; this space was dominated by benches
and tables, Bunsen burners, glassware, and fume hoods. This so-called
‘classical laboratory’ (Peter Morris) would dominate chemical university
practice until the 1960s.9
The lessons taught in practical chemistry at some universities from about
1770 onwards, as mentioned above, focused primarily on training skills in
making chemical substances and analysing their composition. One essential
ingredient of later academic chemistry was missing: research. As Alan Rocke
has argued, Justus Liebig took the crucial step in that direction. He not only
engaged selected students in his research programme but also created small
teams of students who collectively worked on important research questions.
Liebig’s creation of a research laboratory within the University of Giessen
is often seen as the starting point of the Laboratory Revolution. (See also
the section on historiography below.10
Turning a teaching laboratory into a teaching-research lab was definitely
a revolution in science. It was not just a matter of doing the same kind of
research but with more hands than before; it also implied a new conception
of what chemical knowledge was about and what was required for breeding
up-to-date academic chemists. This new trend in science and academic
8 Brian Gee, ‘Amusement Chests and Portable Laboratories: Practical Alternatives to the
Regular Laboratory’, in Frank A.J.L. James, ed., The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on
the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilization (Basingstoke/London: The Macmillan Press,
1989), pp. 37–59; Das Laboratorium. Eine Sammlung von Abbildungen und Beschreibungen der
besten und neuesten Apparate zum Behuf der practischen und physicalischen Chemie, 44 Hefte
(Weimar: Grossherzogl. Sächs. priv. Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1825–40).
9 Holmes, Eighteenth-Century Chemistry; Homburg, ‘The Rise of Analytical Chemistry’;
Holmes, ‘Laboratory, Chemical’; Klein, ‘The Laboratory Challenge’; Peter J.T. Morris, ‘The History
of Chemical Laboratories: A Thematic Approach’, ChemTexts: The Textbook Journal of Chemistry,
7(3) (2021), p. 7.
10 Alan J. Rocke, ‘Origins and Spread of the “Giessen model” in University Science’, Ambix, 50
(2003), 90–115, reprinted as Chapter 2 in this volume; Holmes, ‘Laboratory, Chemical’, p. 442.
18 Klaas van Berkel and Er nst Homburg
training therefore met with fierce resistance from more traditional chemists. The Viennese professor of chemistry Paul Meissner criticized Liebig
for turning chemistry into a search for new substances. Liebig did this, so
Meissner argued, only to become a celebrity. He called it ‘a French disease’
to strive for novelty instead of deep understanding. In his view the aim of
science ought to be to develop a ‘system’, to order known facts in a logical
way. Liebig had attacked Meissner for his failure to produce any new chemical
‘fact’, but the Austrian professor did not care much about discovering new
facts. He saw himself as a scholar, not as an experimentalist.11
Resistance was also quite common when laboratory research later
entered the field of medicine.12 Hospital physicians were sceptical of the
usefulness and the relevance of laboratory studies in medicine. According
to them, clinical experience was much more important than expertise in
experimental research in a laboratory. But proponents of the laboratory
revolution in medicine, like Claude Bernard, claimed that their experimental
research on the causes of disease not only delivered important clinical
benefits but also resulted in unmediated, and therefore much more reliable,
knowledge of ‘Nature’ than the observation of sick patients in a hospital.
The new techniques and instruments in the laboratory eliminated the
human, subjective element and made it possible to get an objective idea of
the workings of nature. According to Bernard and his followers, nature was
most herself in the laboratory, where she spoke clearly in her own voice. Just
like in chemistry, the cognitive claims of the advocates of laboratory science
went against the established views of science. The rise of the laboratory
was therefore not the result of a gradual evolution of techniques and ideas,
but of a revolutionary break with existing ideas and conceptions of what
science should be.
Despite the resistance from some established scientists and practitioners,
the ‘model’ of the teaching-research laboratory developed by Liebig was
introduced in most universities in Europe and North America between
about 1840 and 1880, not only in chemistry but also in other disciplines. Alan
Rocke and others have demonstrated that shortly after Liebig introduced his
new laboratory practices during the 1830s, other professors in chemistry in
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Great Britain followed in his footsteps:
11 Ernst Homburg, Van beroep ‘Chemiker’: De opkomst van de industriële chemicus en het polytechnische onderwijs in Duitsland (1790-1850) (Delft: Delftse Universitaire Pers, 1993), pp. 314–16,
323–25, 328–34.
12 See especially: Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, eds., The Laboratory Revolution
in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 10–11.
The Joint Em ergence of the Teaching-Research Laboratory 19
Göttingen (1838), Prague (1840), Marburg (1841), Leipzig (1842), Royal College
of Chemistry, London (1845), University College, London (1845), Vienna (1845),
and Halle (c.1846). By the 1870s almost all university chemistry departments
in Europe and the United States had followed these examples.13
Compared to this rather rapid dissemination of the ‘Giessen model’ among
university chemistry departments, the diffusion to other disciplines was
more gradual. In these disciplines there were ‘cabinets’, ‘theatres’, ‘botanical
gardens’, and ‘dissection rooms’, but no ‘laboratories’. During the nineteenth
century a kind of two-step process becomes evident: first, the introduction of
‘laboratories’ or the renaming of cabinets etc. into ‘laboratories’, and second,
the development of these laboratories into full-fledged teaching-research
laboratories.
Physics was among the earliest non-chemical disciplines in which the
term ‘laboratory’ was introduced. As Frans van Lunteren notes in his chapter
in this book, many of the leading ‘experimental physicists’ of the first half of
the nineteenth century also had a background in chemistry. An example is
Gustav Magnus, who started a physics laboratory in Berlin during the 1840s.
He was joined by a few ‘mathematical physicists’, such as Wilhelm Weber
in Göttingen and Franz Neumann in Königsberg, who established physics
laboratories at about the same time.14 Most of these early physics laboratories
were quite small though. The same applies to the student numbers, resulting
from the then very limited career prospects for physicists as compared to
chemists. Only after 1860 would larger teaching-research laboratories be
created in, for instance, Göttingen, Berlin, and Oxford.15
A similar pattern was followed in medicine, particularly in physiology.
The first laboratories in this field were also founded in the 1830s and 1840s,
for instance by Johannes Müller in Berlin, Jan Purkyně in Breslau, and Jacob
13 Rocke, ‘Origins and Spread’ (Ch. 2); W.V. Farrar, ‘Science and the German University System,
1790–1850’, in Maurice Crosland, ed., The Emergence of Science in Western Europe (London/
Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 1975), pp. 179–92, esp. p. 187; Homburg, Van beroep ‘Chemiker’,
pp. 328–34; Anderson, ‘The Creation of the Chemistry Teaching Laboratory’, p. 20; Morris, The
Matter Factory, pp. 109–14; Holmes, ‘Laboratory, Chemical’, p. 442.
14 Frans van Lunteren, ‘The Laboratory Ethos, 1850–1900’, see Chapter 3 in this volume; Farrar,
‘Science and the German University System’, pp. 187–88; Henning Schmidgen, ‘The Laboratory’,
European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG) (2011), p. 5,
<http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/crossroads/knowledge-spaces/henning-schmidgen-laboratory>
(accessed 8 November 2022).
15 Farrar, ‘Science and the German University System’, pp. 187–89; Graeme Gooday, ‘Precision
Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain’, British
Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 25–51; Graeme Gooday, ‘Placing or Replacing the
Laboratory in the History of Science?’, Isis, 99 (2008), 783–95; Rocke, ‘Origins and Spread’ (Ch. 2).
20 Klaas van Berkel and Er nst Homburg
Henle in Heidelberg. It also took until the 1860s and 1870s before large
teaching-research laboratories in medicine were erected in Leipzig, Paris,
Groningen, Berlin, and Utrecht.16
Between 1870 and 1900 most other disciplines followed. Teaching-research
laboratories were, for instance, erected by universities in bacteriology,17
biology,18 and engineering,19 to mention some examples documented in
the literature.