English

Noun

spagyrist ‎(plural spagyrists)

1. (alchemy) An alchemist, especially one who tried to discover remedies for diseases.
   • 2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage 2007, p. 1192:

     Back when I was still a junior alchemist, passing through What Cheer, Iowa, met up with this old-school spagyrist name of Doddling, who showed me how to get silver to grow just like a tree.

   • 1994, Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, Harcourt Brace 1995, p. 21:

     The Carmelite enjoyed the general amazement, and he told father and son how the secret of this substance had been revealed to him by an Arab; it was medicine far more powerful than the one Christian spagyrists called unguentum armarium.

Related terms

• spagyric

See also

• iatrochemist