spagyrist

plural spagyrists

1. alchemyAn alchemist, especially one who tried to discover remedies for diseases.

   Back when I was still a junior alchemist, passing through What Cheer, Iowa, met up with this old-school spagyrist name of Doddling, who showed me how to get silver to grow just like a tree.

   2006, Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”, in Against the Day, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, →ISBN, page 1060

   2 more examples

   It has, of late more particularly, assumed not only an unforbidding, but even an engaging form, by the facility with which many of its most important researches are now conducted, and by the extension of them to numerous objects which had not before been attended to by the old spagyrists.

   1780, Francis de Wasserberg, “Chemical Institutions for the Use of Students”, in The Monthly Review, Or, Literary Journal, volume 63, page 502

   The Carmelite enjoyed the general amazement, and he told father and son how the secret of this substance had been revealed to him by an Arab; it was medicine far more powerful than the one Christian spagyrists called unguentum armarium.

   1994, Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, Harcourt Brace, published 1995, page 21