Part 19

Glauber worked at many subjects for manufacturers, and sold his secrets in many cases. His enemies asserted that he sold the same secret several times, and that he not unfrequently sold secrets which would not work. It is impossible now to test the truth of these accusations. Probably some of the allegations made against him were due to the fact that those who bought his processes were not as skilful as he was. One secret which he claimed to have discovered he would neither sell nor publish. It was that of the Alkahest, or universal solvent. To make this known might, he feared, “encourage the luxury, pride, and godlessness of poor humanity.”

Oliver Cromwell wrote in an old volume of Glauber’s Alchemy: “This Glauber is an errant knave. I doe bethinke me he speaketh of wonders which cannot be accomplished; but it is lawful for man too the endeavour.”

Glauber complained that he was not appreciated, which was probably true. “I grieve over the ignorance of my contemporaries,” he wrote, “and the ingratitude of men. Men are always envious, wicked, ungrateful. For myself, faithful to the maxim, _Ora et Labora_, I fulfil my career, do what I can, and await my reward.” Elsewhere he writes, “If I have not done all the good in the world that I should have desired, it has been the perversity of men that has hindered me.” His employees, he says, were unfaithful. Having learned his processes, they became inflated with pride, and left him. Apparently there was a good business to be done in chemical secrets at that time. But Glauber did not give away all he knew, and he found it best to do all his important work himself. “I have learnt by expensive experience,” he wrote, “the truth of the proverb, ‘Wer seine Sachen will gethan haben recht, Muss selbsten seyn Herr und Knecht.’”

Although all Glauber’s books appeared with Latin titles they were written in German.

GOULARD.

Thomas Goulard was a surgeon of Montpellier with rather more than a local reputation. He was counsellor to the king, perpetual mayor of the town of Alet, lecturer and demonstrator royal in surgery, demonstrator royal of anatomy in the College of Physicians, fellow of the Royal Academies of Sciences in Montpellier, Toulouse, Lyons, and Nancy, pensioner of the king and of the province of Languedoc for lithotomy, and surgeon to the Military Hospital of Montpellier. His treatise on “The Extract of Saturn” was published about the middle of the eighteenth century, and his name and the preparations he devised were soon spread all over Europe. White lead and sugar of lead, and litharge as the basis of plasters had been familiar in medical practice for centuries; and Galen and other great authorities had highly commended lead preparations for eye diseases and for general lotions. The preparation of sugar of lead is indicated in the works attributed to Basil Valentine. Goulard’s special merit consisted in the care which he gave to the production of his “Extract of Saturn,” and in his intelligent experiments with it, and its various preparations in the treatment of external complaints.

Goulard made his extract of Saturn by boiling together golden litharge and strong French wine vinegar at a moderate heat for about an hour, stirring all the while, and after cooling drawing off for use the clear supernatant liquor. Diluting this extract by adding 100 drops to a quart of river water with four teaspoonfuls of brandy, made what he called his Vegeto-Mineral Water, which he used for lotions. His cerate of Saturn was made by melting 4 oz. of wax in 11 oz. of olive oil, and incorporating with this 6 lbs. of vegeto-mineral water (containing 4 oz. of extract of Saturn). A cataplasm was made by gently boiling the vegeto-mineral water with crumb of bread. A pomatum was prepared by combining 4 oz. of the extract with a cerate composed of 8 oz. of wax in 18 oz. of rose ointment. This was made stronger or milder as the case might need. There was another pomatum made with the extract of Saturn, sulphur, and alum, for the treatment of itch; and several plasters for rheumatic complaints. Goulard gave full details of the various uses of these applications in inflammations, bruises, wounds, abscesses, erysipelas, ophthalmia, ulcers, cancers, whitlows, tetters, piles, itch, and other complaints. His own experience was supported by that of other practitioners.

In giving the results of his experience thus freely and completely, Goulard was aware of the sacrifice he was making. “I flatter myself,” he says, “that the world is in some measure indebted to me for publishing this medicine, which, if concealed in my own breast, might have turned out much more to my private emolument”; at the same time he did not object to reap some profit from his investigations, if this could be done. At the end of the English translation of his book, a copy of a document is printed addressed to his fellow student of fifty years before, Mr. G. Arnaud, practising as a surgeon in London, engaging to supply to him, and to him only, a sufficient quantity of extract of Saturn made by himself, to be distributed by the said Mr. Arnaud, or by those commissioned by him, over all the dominions of his British Majesty.

SCHEELE.

Karl Wilhelm Scheele is the most famous of pharmacists, and has few equals in scientific history. He was the seventh child of a merchant at Stralsund, then in the possession of Sweden, and was born on December 9th, 1742. He had a fair education and at school was diligent and apt in acquiring knowledge. If he was born with a gift, if his genius was anything more than an immense capacity for taking pains, this aptness was the faculty which distinguished Scheele from other men. He made thousands of experiments and never forgot what he had learned from any one of them; he read such scientific books as he could get, and never needed to refer to them again. His friend Retsius, a pharmacist like himself as a young man, but subsequently Director of the Museum of Lund, has recorded Scheele’s remarkable power in this respect. “When he was at Malmö,” he writes (this was when Scheele was about twenty-four years of age), “he bought as many books as his small pay enabled him to procure. He would read these once or twice, and would then remember all that interested him, and never consulted them again.”

An elder brother of Karl had been apprenticed to an apothecary at Gothenburg, but had died during his apprenticeship. Karl went to this apothecary, a Mr. Bauch, as apprentice at the age of fourteen, and remained there till Bauch sold his business in 1765. Then he went to another apothecary named Kjellström at Malmö. Three years later he was chief assistant to a Mr. Scharenberg at Stockholm. His next move was to Upsala with a Mr. Lokk, who appreciated his assistant and gave him plenty of time for his scientific work.

Lastly, he took the management of a pharmacy at Köping for a widow who owned it, and after an anxious time in clearing the business from debt, he bought the business in 1776 and for the rest of his short life was in fairly comfortable circumstances. Ill-health then pursued him, rheumatism and attacks of melancholy. In the spring of 1786, in the forty-fourth year of his age, after suffering for two months from a slow fever, he died. Two days before his death he married the widow of his predecessor, whose business he had rescued from ruin, so that she might repossess it. A few months later she married again.

That was Scheele’s life as a pharmacist; patient, plodding, conscientious, only moderately successful, and shadowed by many disappointments. The work he accomplished as a scientific chemist would have been marvellous if he had had all his time to do it in; under the actual circumstances in which it was performed it is simply incomprehensible. A bare catalogue of his achievements is all that can be noted here, but it must be remembered that he never announced any discovery until he had checked his first conclusions by repeated and varied tests.

An account of an investigation of cream of tartar resulting in the isolation of tartaric acid was his first published paper. He next made an examination of fluor-spar from which resulted the separation of fluoric acid. From this on the suggestion of Bergmann he proceeded to a series of experiments on black oxide of manganese which besides showing the many important combinations of the metal led the chemist direct to his wonderful discoveries of oxygen, chlorine, and barytes. This work put him on the track of the observations set forth in his famous work on “Air and Fire.” In this he explained the composition of the atmosphere, which, he said, consisted of two gases, one of which he named “empyreal” or “fire-air,” the same as he had obtained from black oxide of manganese, and other substances. He realised and described with much acuteness the part this gas played in nature, and the rest of the book contained many remarkable observations which showed how nearly Scheele approached the new ideas which Lavoisier was to formulate only a few years later. “Air and Fire” was not issued till 1777, three years after Priestley had demonstrated the separate existence and characteristics of what he termed “dephlogisticated air.” But it is well known that the long delay of Scheele’s printer in completing his work was one of the disappointments of his life, and there is evidence that his discovery of oxygen was actually made in 1773, a year before Priestley had isolated the same element. Both of these great experimenters missed the full significance of their observations through the confusing influence of the phlogiston theory, which neither of them questioned, and which was so soon to be destroyed as the direct result of their labours.

Among the other investigations which Scheele carried out were his proof that plumbago was a form of carbon, his invention of a new process for the manufacture of calomel, his discovery of lactic, malic, oxalic, citric, and gallic acids, of glycerin, and his exposition of the chemical process which yielded Prussian blue, with his incidental isolation of prussic acid, a substance which he described minutely though he gives no hint whatever to show that he knew anything of its poisonous nature.

The subjects mentioned by no means exhaust the mere titles of the work which Scheele accomplished; they are only the more popular of his results. The value of his scientific accomplishments was appreciated in his lifetime, but not fully until the advance of chemistry set them out in their true perspective. Then it was realised how completely and accurately he had finished the many inquiries which he had taken in hand.

A PHARMACEUTICAL PANTHEON.

The School of Pharmacy of Paris, built in 1880, honours a number of pharmacists of historic fame by placing a series of medallions on the façade of the building, as well as statues of two specially eminent representatives of the profession in the Court of Honour. These two are Vauquelin and Parmentier.

Louis Nicolas Vauquelin was director of the School from its foundation in 1803 until his death in 1829. He also held professorships at the School of Mines, at the Polytechnic School, and with the Faculty of Medicine. He began his career as a boy in the laboratory of a pharmacist at Rouen, and later got a situation with M. Cheradame, a pharmacist in Paris. Cheradame was related to Fourcroy, to whom he introduced his pupil. Fourcroy paid him £12 a year with board and lodging, but he proved such an indefatigable worker that in no long time he became the colleague, the friend, and the indispensable substitute of his master in his analyses as well as in his lectures. He is cited as the discoverer of chromium, of glucinium, and of several animal products; but his most important work was a series of chemical investigations on belladonna, cinchona, ipecacuanha, and other drugs, which it is recognised opened the way for the definite separation of some of the most valuable of the alkaloids accomplished afterwards by Pelletier, Caventou, Robiquet, and others. Vauquelin published more than 250 scientific articles.

Antoine Augustin Parmentier (born 1737, died 1813), after serving an apprenticeship with a pharmacist at Montpellier, joined the pharmaceutical service in the army, and distinguished himself in the war in Germany, especially in the course of an epidemic by which the French soldiers suffered seriously. He was taken prisoner five times, and at one period had to support himself almost entirely on potatoes. On the last occasion he obtained employment with a Frankfort chemist named Meyer, who would have gladly kept him with him. But Parmentier preferred to return to his own country, and obtained an appointment in the pharmacy of the Hotel des Invalides, rising to the post of chief apothecary there in a few years. A prize offered by the Academy of Besançon for the best means of averting the calamities of famine was won by him in 1771, his German experience being utilised in his advocacy of the cultivation of potatoes. These tubers, though they had been widely cultivated in France in the sixteenth century, had gone entirely out of favour, and were at that time only given to cattle. The people had come to believe that they occasioned leprosy and various fevers. Parmentier worked with rare perseverance to combat this prejudice. He cultivated potatoes on an apparently hopeless piece of land which the Government placed at his disposal, and when the flowers appeared he made a bouquet of them and presented it to Louis XVI, who wore the blossoms in his button-hole. His triumph was complete, for very soon the potato was again cultivated all through France. The royalist favour that he had enjoyed put him in some danger during the Revolution; but in the latter days of the Convention, which had deprived him of his official position and salary, he was employed to organise the pharmaceutical service of the army. He also invented a syrup of grapes which he proposed to the Minister of War as a substitute for sugar during the continental blockade.

The medallions, in the order in which they appear on the façade of the École de Pharmacie, represent the following French and foreign pharmacists:--

Antoine Jerome Balard, the discoverer of bromine (born 1802, died 1876), was a native of Montpellier, where he qualified as a pharmacist and commenced business. As a student he had worked with the salts deposited from a salt marsh in the neighbourhood, and had been struck with a coloration which certain tests gave with a solution of sulphate of soda obtained from the marsh. Pursuing his experiments, he arrived at the discovery of bromine, the element which formed the link between chlorine and iodine. This early success won for him a medal from the Royal Society of London and a professorship of chemistry at Montpellier, and subsequently raised him to high scientific positions in Paris. Balard did much more scientific work, among which was the elaboration of a process for the production of potash salts from salt marshes. He had worked at this for some twenty years, and had taken patents for his methods, when the announcement of the discovery of the potash deposits at Stassfurt effectually destroyed all his hope of commercial success.

Joseph Bienaimé Caventou (born at St. Omer 1795, died 1877) carried on for many years an important pharmaceutical business in Paris. His fame rests on his association with Pelletier in the discovery of quinine in 1820.

Joseph Pelletier (born 1788, died 1842) was the son of a Paris pharmacist, and was one of the most brilliant workers in pharmacy known to us. He is best known for his isolation of quinine. Either alone, or in association with others, he investigated the nature of ipecacuanha, nux vomica, colchicum, cevadilla, hellebore, pepper, opium, and other drugs, and a long series of alkaloids is credited to him. He also contributed valuable researches on cochineal, santal, turmeric, and other colouring materials. To him and his associate, Caventou, the Institute awarded the Prix Monthyon of 10,000 francs for their discovery of quinine, and this was the only reward they obtained for their cinchona researches, for they took out no patents.

Pierre Robiquet (born at Rennes in 1780, died at Paris, 1840) served his apprenticeship to pharmacy at Lorient, and afterwards studied under Fourcroy and Vauquelin at Paris. His studies were interrupted by the conscription, which compelled him to serve under Napoleon in the Army of Italy. Returning to pharmacy after Marengo, he ultimately became the proprietor of a pharmacy, and to that business he added the manufacture of certain fine chemicals. His first scientific work was the separation of asparagin, accomplished in association with Vauquelin, in 1805. His later studies were in connection with opium (from which he extracted codeine), on liquorice, cantharides, barytes, and nickel.

André Constant Dumeril (born at Amiens, 1774, died 1860) was a physician, but distinguished himself as a naturalist and anatomist. He had been associated with Cuvier in early life. Latterly he was consulting physician to Louis Philippe.

Antoine Louis Brongniart (born 1742, died 1804) was the son of a pharmacist of Paris, and became himself pharmacien to Louis XVI. He also served the Convention as a military pharmacist, and was placed on the Council of Health of the Army. In association with Hassenfratz who was one of the organisers of the insurrection of August 10th, 1792, and himself a professor at the School of Mines, Brongniart edited a “Journal des Sciences, Arts, et Metiers” during the Revolution.

The next medallion memorialises Scheele, the great Swedish pharmacist and chemist, of whose career details have already been given.

Pierre Bayen (born at Chalons s/Marne, 1725, died 1798) was an army pharmacist for about half of his life, and to him was largely due the organisation of that service. He was with the French Army in Germany all through the Seven Years’ War, 1757-1763. Among his scientific works were examinations of many of the natural mineral waters of France, and a careful investigation into the alleged danger of tin vessels used for cooking. Two German chemists, Margraff and Henkel, had reported the presence of arsenic in tin utensils generally, and the knowledge of this fact had produced a panic among housekeepers. Bayen went into the subject thoroughly and was able to publish a reassuring report. To him, too, belongs the glory of having been one of the chemists before Lavoisier to prove that metals gain and do not lose weight on calcination in the air.

Pierre Joseph Macquer, Master of Pharmacy and Doctor of Medicine (born 1718, died 1784), came of a noble Scotch family who had settled in France on account of their adherence to the Catholic faith, made some notable chemical discoveries, and became director of the royal porcelain factory at Sèvres. He worked on kaolin, magnesia, arsenic, gold, platinum, and the diamond. The bi-arseniate of arsenic was for a long time known as Macquer’s arsenical salt. Macquer was not quite satisfied with Stahl’s phlogiston theory, and tried to modify it; but he would not accept the doctrines of Lavoisier. He proposed to substitute light for phlogiston, and regarded light as precipitated from the air in certain conditions. These notions attracted no support.

Guillaume François Rouelle (born near Caen, 1703, died 1770) was in youth an enthusiastic student of chemistry, the rudiments of which he taught himself in the village smithy. Going to Paris he obtained a situation in the pharmacy which had been Lemery’s, and subsequently established one of his own in the Rue Jacob. There he commenced courses of private lectures which were characterised by such intimate knowledge, and flavoured with such earnestness and, as appears from the stories given by pupils, by a good deal of eccentricity, that they became the popular resort of chemical students. Lavoisier is believed to have attended them. Commencing his lectures in full professional costume, he would soon become animated and absorbed in his subject, and throwing off his gown, cap, wig and cravat, delighted his hearers with his vigour. Rouelle was offered the position of apothecary to the king, but declined the honour as it would have involved the abandonment of his lectures. His chief published work was the classification of salts into neutral, acid, and basic. He also closely investigated medicinal plants, and got so near to the discovery of alkaloids as the separation of what he called the immediate principles, making a number of vegetable extracts.

Etienne François Geoffrey (born 1672, died 1731), the son of a Paris apothecary, himself of high reputation, for it was at his house that the first meetings were held which resulted in the formation of the Academy of Sciences, studied pharmacy at Montpellier, and qualified there. Returning to Paris he went through the medical course and submitted for his doctorate three theses which show the bent of his mind. The first examined whether all diseases have one origin and can be cured by one remedy, the second aimed to prove that the philosophic physician must also be an operative chemist, and the third dealt with the inquiry whether man had developed from a worm. Geoffrey was attached as physician to the English embassy for some time and was elected to the Royal Society of London. Afterwards he became professor of medicine and pharmacy at the College of France. His chief works were pharmacological researches on iron, on vitriol, on fermentation, and on some mineral waters. He wrote a notable treatise on Materia Medica.

Albert Seba was an apothecary of Amsterdam, who spent some part of his early life in the Dutch Indies. He was born in 1668 and died in 1736. He was particularly noted for a great collection illustrating all the branches of natural history, finer than any other then known in Europe. Peter the Great having seen this collection bought it for a large sum and presented it to the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, where it is still preserved.

Anxious to pay due honour to the distinguished pharmacists of other nations, the authorities of the School of Pharmacy introduce the medallions of Dante and Sir Isaac Newton. The Italian poet’s connection with pharmacy was the entirely nominal inscription of his name in the guild of apothecaries of the city of Florence; there are almost slighter grounds to the right of claiming the English philosopher among pharmacists, his immediate association with the business having been that as a schoolboy he lodged at Grantham with an apothecary of the name of Clark. In his later years he worked with Boyle on ether.