A 17th-century alchemist confronts modern science with unintended and amusing results. Another sparkling addition to the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire alternate history series created by Eric Flint.
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE VS. FLIM-FLAMMERY
Thomas 'the Great Stoner' Stone once performed miraculous surgery upon Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the World’s Greatest Alchemist, using his bare hands, no anesthesia, producing no pain, and leaving no scar. It would have been wonderful if it was real.
But Dr. Tom Stone, the face of modern medicine, has been engaging in fake treatments—bringing all modern medicine into question. Phillip, who has learned a thing or two about actual science from those up-time elopers from Grantville, West Virginia, decides to go to Padua and turn his problems into Tom Stone's problems.
Meanwhile, the wily Bernardo Ponzi has assembled a team to support his evangelical touring roadshow featuring a light show, faith healing and yet more psychic surgery. Now Gribbleflotz and Stone are on a collision course with the Magnificent Ponzi, who has moved beyond showman-like fakery to causing actual
harm to many people. It’s time for Gribbleflotz and Stone to resolve their differences, debunk one of history’s greatest bunko artists, and save the reputation of modern science and medicine from ruin!
A sparkling addition to the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire alternate history series created by Eric Flint. An alchemist of the 17th century confronts modern science with often amusing results. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the world's greatest alchemist and a great-grandson of Paracelsus-and a Bombast on his mother's side-was a man history had forgotten. But when the town of Grantville was transported by a cosmic accident from modern West Virginia to central Germany in the early seventeenth century, he got a second chance at fame and fortune. The world's greatest alchemist does not make household goods. But with suitable enticements Gribbleflotz is persuaded to make baking soda and then baking powder so that the time-displaced Americans can continue to enjoy such culinary classics as biscuits and gravy. Applying his superb grasp of the principles of alchemy to the muddled and confused notions the Americans have concerning what they call "chemistry," Gribbleflotz leaves obscurity behind. In his relentless search for a way to invigorate the quinta essential of the human humors, Gribbleflotz plays a central role in jump-starting the seventeenth century's new chemical and marital aids industries-and pioneering such critical fields of human knowledge as pyramidology and aura imaging. These are his chronicles.
