Jacob Green

Jacob Green taught chemistry, natural history, and experimental philosophy during a wide-ranging American scientific career. After legal training, he accepted a professorship covering those subjects at Princeton in 1818. He later joined Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he held the chemistry chair and contributed to the institution’s opening lecture tradition. Advantages of Chemistry preserves the introductory address Green delivered in Jefferson’s chemical theatre at the start of the 1834 to 1835 session. The full work considers chemistry as both a field of knowledge and a practical discipline for medical students. Published in Philadelphia in 1834, the thirty-page address belongs beside Green’s wider writing on electricity, botany, mineralogy, zoology, and chemical philosophy. Advantages of Chemistry is therefore a concise example of his public teaching voice and of the role formal addresses played in presenting scientific education to a new medical class.