Debus, Allen G.

Allen George Debus (1926-2009) was a renowned American historian of science who served on the faculty of the University of Chicago Department of History from 1961 until his retirement in 1996.

Debus was born an only child in Chicago, Illinois on August 16, 1926. He was raised in the north-Chicago suburb of Evanston and attended Evanston Township High School from 1940-1944. He studied chemistry and history at Northwestern University earning a B.S. in Chemistry in 1947 with almost enough credits to support a second major in History. He followed this latter path to Indiana University (1947-1949) where he acted as assistant to Professor John J. Murray, who advised him to write his Master’s thesis on chemistry in the English Tudor period. The result was entitled “Robert Boyle and Chemistry in England 1660-1700”. From 1951 to 1956, Debus worked as a research chemist at Abbott Laboratories. In 1956, he returned to graduate work at Harvard University, supervised by I. Bernard Cohen, where he was awarded two Bowdoin Awards in the Natural Sciences. During the same period he conducted research and acted as a teaching assistant at University College, London under the auspices of a joint Fulbright and Social Science Research Council Fellowship and the guidance of Professors Douglas McKie and Walter Pagel. The latter became a long-distance dissertation advisor for Debus’ doctoral dissertation “The English Paracelsians: A Study of Iatrochemistry in England to 1640”, which he completed in 1961.

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