Abstract :
By looking at the fierce debates in the city of Carlsbad in Bohemia around the
fabrication of medical salt by a local doctor, David Becher, from 1763 to 1784, the paper
examines the interactions between different spheres or levels of circulation of knowledge in the
Habsburg Empire. The dispute crystallized around the definition of the product, about its
medical qualities and its relation with the water of the local mineral spring. The city’s
inhabitants contested the vision of the medical experts, fearing that the extraction of the
medical salt from the spring water and its sale outside the town would have a negative effect on
the number of visitors to the spa. Their vision implied a more or less ‘popularized’ form of
alchemical thinking as it identified the mineral water with the extracted ‘salt’, conceived as
the ‘essence’ of the water, produced by evaporation. The Carlsbad salt dispute highlights the
complex interactions among the different networks in which knowledge circulated through
the Habsburg Empire in the eighteenth century. The different actors relied on specific networks
with different logics of discourse and different modes of circulation. In each case the relation
between the local, the regional and the imperial had to be negotiated. The paper thus sketches
out the different geographies of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire but also its localization in
and around Carlsbad.
