[Through her anonymous works, Madame Thiroux d'Arconville, a woman writer and an enlightened chemist]

Self-taught and polygraph, philanthropist and moralist, Madame Thiroux d'Arconville (1720-1805) published thirty works or so, all of them anonymously. She devoted herself to science, in particular to chemistry, for about ten years. She translated two books from English, improving them with a number of useful notes: Robert Dossie's The Elaboratory laid open and Peter Shaw's Chemical lectures. In the latter book, she added a long preliminary discourse which amounts to a history of applied chemistry to arts. She also carried out the more than 300 experiments on the preservation of meat from putrefaction with the aim to obtain a theory on matter transformation, which was a subject of debate among physiologists and philosophers of her time. Her results were published in 1766 in the Essai pour servir à l'histoire de la putréfaction. From the analysis of her texts, both her large culture and her scientific qualities and ambition can be emphasized.