The American new dispensatory : Containing general principles of pharmaceutic chemistry; chemical analysis of the articles of materia medica; pharmaceutic operations; materia medica, including several new and valuable articles, the production of the United States; preparations and compositions. With an appendix, containing an account of mineral waters; medical prescriptions; the nature and medical uses of the gases; medical electricity; galvanism; an abridgment of Dr. Currie's reports on the use of water; the cultivation of the poppy plant, and the method of preparing opium ... The whole compiled from the most approved authors, both European and American.

  • Thacher, James, 1754-1844.
Date:
[1813]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The American new dispensatory : Containing general principles of pharmaceutic chemistry; chemical analysis of the articles of materia medica; pharmaceutic operations; materia medica, including several new and valuable articles, the production of the United States; preparations and compositions. With an appendix, containing an account of mineral waters; medical prescriptions; the nature and medical uses of the gases; medical electricity; galvanism; an abridgment of Dr. Currie's reports on the use of water; the cultivation of the poppy plant, and the method of preparing opium ... The whole compiled from the most approved authors, both European and American. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    56/744
    or arc obtained by it from incisions made in the brandies or trunk. After Ave have discovered the proximate principles of vegetables, the next step is to ascertain their composition. This is an investigation attended, however, with much difficulty, as being' liable to all the deceptions arising from a complicated analysis, and incapable of being con- firmed by the surer test which synthesis affords. The composition of these substances with respect to their ultimate principles is nearly uniform. All of them contain carbon and hydrogen, generally if not invariably united with oxygen: some farther contain nitrogen and phosphorus; and in others several of the metals, particu- larly iron and manganese, exist. Lime, too, and the two fixed alkalis, cither pure or more commonly in combina- tion with some of the acids, arc not unfrequently constitu- ents of vegetable matter. These latter substances, how- ever, are seldom in any considerable proportion; nor in general do they appear to modify much the properties of the substances in which they exist. Nitrogen, and perhaps lime, when present, appear to have the most important influence, and with the exception of the few compounds of which they form a principal part, it may be said. that, the vegetable proximate principles consist of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; the differences in their properties being produced by differences in the proportions of these principles and of the modes in which they are combined. That a difference in the proportions of these elements may give rise to the differences in the properties of the compounds which they form, cannot be doubted; since in many other cases of chemical combinations, where there is no difficulty in the analysis, differences equally impor- tant and well marked are produced by this cause. In vegetable substances we accordingly can often trace this as the cause without being able to point out any other. Thus, fixed and volatile oils have properties in many respects dissimilar: by analysis both are found to consist of carbon and hydrogen, united only in different propor- tions, the volatile oils having more hydrogen in proportion to the carbon than the fixed have: this is a cause sufficient to account for the difference in their properties; and it accords sufficiently with that difference, for hydrogen being a substance extremely rare and volatile, those compounds in which it predominates, as ether, alcohol,