The adulteration of food : conferences by the Institute of Chemistry on Monday and Tuesday, July 14th and 15th : food adulteration and analysis.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The adulteration of food : conferences by the Institute of Chemistry on Monday and Tuesday, July 14th and 15th : food adulteration and analysis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    History of Louis XIV.'s reign, the crimes of the Chambre ardente, of St. Croix, de Brinvilliers, the priest Le Sage, and the women la Voizin and la Vigoureux—of these Madame de Brinvilliers was specially infamous. She is said to be the inventor of les poudres de succession, and essayed their strength on the patients at the H6tel Dieu. She poisoned her father, brothers, sisters, and others of her family, but a terrible fate overtook both her and her instructor and master in villany, St. Croix—St. Croix was suffocated by deleterious vapours from his own chemicals ; Madame de Brinvilliers' crimes being known, she fled and took refuge in a convent, from which she was lured by a detective, who disguised himself as an amorous Abbe ; she was beheaded and her body burnt near Notre Dame, in the middle of the reign of Louis XIV. The old poison lore, mixed up with legend, myth and superstition, culminated in the use of arsenic. Arsenic white, tasteless, and deadly, capable of introduction into the human frame in all manner of subtle ways, of killing slowly or quickly, and of simulating the effects of disease was at one time almost synonymous with poison. For more than a century, after the properties of arsenic were to some extent popularised, there was no certain method known for its detection ; and as late as 1836, whatever evidence of arsenical poisoning might be afforded by collateral circum- stances, the risk of detection by chemical analysis was not great; hence the invention of a certain test for arsenic is so important, that the date of its discovery marks a toxico- logical epoch, from whence we may fairly date the rise of the modern poison lore. The great chemist, Scheele, in the eighteenth century, observed that arsenic united with hydrogen and made a very peculiar and fetid gas. After him Proust also studied the gas, and observed that when arsenical tin was dissolved in hydrochloric acid, that the gas could be lit, and then when allowed to play upon a cold surface, stains of the metal arsenicum were deposited. Trommsdorf next announced, in 1803, that when arsenical zinc was introduced into an ordinary flask with water and [L- 25] B 3