Valedictory address to the graduates of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy : delivered in Sansom Street Hall, March 18, 1852 / by William Procter.

  • Procter, William, Jr., 1817-1874.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Valedictory address to the graduates of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy : delivered in Sansom Street Hall, March 18, 1852 / by William Procter. 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.)

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    From this period pharmacy made slow advances; the number of useless and absurd medicines gradually lessened. The labours of Van Helmont, a century later, helped on the reform, whilst Glauber of Amsterdam, and Lemery of Paris, striking out into unexplored paths, brought in new and valuable accessions to the existing list. The laborers now became more numerous; the period of the advent of modern chemistry was approaching; its ad- vanced guard which had been skirmishing for centuries, was gradually nearing the citadel of truth, yet, before its attainment, the Stahlian doctrine of Phlogiston, like the deceptive mist-cloud of Homer's warring goddess, long kept them in abeyance, and dis- appointed their hopes. It was not until Black and Cavendish Priestly and Lavoisier, investigated the gases, determined the compound nature of air and water, and the true nature of combus- tion ; it was not until Wenzel, Richter and Dalton, laid the true foundation walls of chemistry, with the laws of combination and definite proportion; on which Davy and Berzelius, Gay Lussac andThenard, Dumas, Liebig and a host of others, erected the grand superstructure of chemical Science, that medicine and pharmacy received their fullest contributions, and were greatly overpaid for the patronage they had extended to its earliest cultivators. I will not occupy time now by sketching the ill shapen features of the pharmacy of the 16th and 17th and part of the 18th cen turies—suffice it to say, that for the most part a blind and supersti- tious empyi-icism, like the hydra of the ancients, met the inquirer in every department, and upheld in its cold embrace, and advocated by its withering breath, the grossest absurdities of the past. It was re- served for organic analysis, the Hercules of modern pharmacy, to cripple this many headed monster of antiquity, by rending the veil which, since the world began, had obscured the proximate and ultimate constitution of organic bodies, and withheld from the physician the knowledge of what really constituted the activity o* organic medicines. The present state of pharmacy and its practitioners in the civil- ized countries of the world is a topic which should interest every apothecary, and is fraught with instruction for us who are in a progressive condition. In China the same causes that have influ-