The London dispensatory : containing, I. The elements of pharmacy; II. The botanical description, natural history,chemical analysis, and medicinal properties, of the substances of the materia medica; III. The pharmaceutical preparations and compositions of the pharmacopoeiasof the London, the Edinburgh, and the Dublin colleges of physicians : the whole forming a practical synopsis of materia medica, pharmacy, and therapeutics, illustrated with many useful tables and copper-plates of pharmaceutical apparatus / by Anthony Todd Thomson.

  • Thomson, Anthony Todd, 1778-1849.
Date:
1822
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The London dispensatory : containing, I. The elements of pharmacy; II. The botanical description, natural history,chemical analysis, and medicinal properties, of the substances of the materia medica; III. The pharmaceutical preparations and compositions of the pharmacopoeiasof the London, the Edinburgh, and the Dublin colleges of physicians : the whole forming a practical synopsis of materia medica, pharmacy, and therapeutics, illustrated with many useful tables and copper-plates of pharmaceutical apparatus / by Anthony Todd Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    which botanists have fixed on as the only means by which a plant, that is not familiar to the reader of a description of it, can with certainty be known, when he wishes to possess it, or is in any doubt regarding it when it is obtained. From the want of this degree of accuracy in the descriptions of plants, many valuable remedies, used by the inhabitants of one part of the world, have been lost to those of another part, where they are, nevertheless, indigenous; or, instead of the proper plants, other species of the same genera, which possess little or no virtue, have been employed; and even plants, not in any respect medicinal, but highly deleterious, have been used as remedies, merely from their bearing names in common or in pharmaceutical language similar to those of some medicinal plants. To prevent this evil, therefore, I have added to the usual account of each vegetable substance the characters of the genus to which the plant belongs, as they are given by Willdenow in his excellent edition of the Species Plantarum : and have also given detailed descriptions of each in the lan- guage employed by modern botanical writers. In the performance of the task of compilation, I have endeavoured to bring together as much useful information, regarding each of the substances treated of, as could be crowded into a small space; and to obtain it, have had re- course to every work of reputation to which I could gain access. For the liberality of Sir Joseph Banks, who, through the kind interference of Dr. Gartshore, opened to me the door of- his princely collection, I have to return my most grateful thanks; as I obtained information there which I could not otherwise have procured, and some which has never before, I believe, been given to the public in an English garb. Of this nature, in particular, are the observations ofZeaon the medicinal species of Cinchona, extracted from the Anales de Historia Naturalthose of Humboldt on the same subject, and on some other South American plants, from his splendid work entitled Plant* jEquinoctiales: and Willdenow's descrip- tion of the Heracleum gummiferum, which I have translated from the Hortus Berolinensis. Information has also been 13