> It's like if all we remembered about Newton was alchemy.
It’s ironic you say this. Like Freud, and unlike Newton, alchemists did not use scientific methodology. Also like Freud, alchemists get an unfair treatment by modern society, being remembered only for their mistakes. Medieval alchemists developed and refined distillation and crystallization, discovered acids and minerals, and developed metallurgy through the extraction of metals from ore. Just like psychology after Freud, the scientific field of chemistry grew rather naturally out of the advances made in alchemy.