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History and What It Became

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History and What It Became

The attribution here is unusually well documented for this whole category, and unusually worth stating carefully. Zosimos of Panopolis, writing in the late third or early fourth century CE, names Maria the Jewess as the source of the water-bath technique, along with several other pieces of laboratory apparatus, in his account of earlier alchemical practice; Maria herself left no surviving text under her own name, so everything known about her contribution reaches modern readers second-hand, through Zosimos's report written some time after the fact rather than through a document in her own hand. That is a genuine, named attribution through a real historical writer, not an anonymous tradition, but it is an attribution at one remove, and the text should be read that way rather than as if Zosimos were an eyewitness.

The name stuck immediately: Latin alchemical writers called the technique balneum Mariae, "Mary's bath," and the French bain-marie, in unbroken use since, is the direct modern descendant of that Latin name. The bain-marie is the single clearest case in this whole category of an ancient named invention still doing its original job today under its original name: it sits in essentially every professional kitchen for melting chocolate and holding sauces, and it sits in essentially every chemistry laboratory as the water bath used whenever a reaction needs gentle, capped heat.

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