The properties and uses of pure glycerin / by M.D., M.R.C.S.

Date:
[1898?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The properties and uses of pure glycerin / by M.D., M.R.C.S. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/56
    chemistry and physics have, it is true, directed by the mind of the great chemist, Fischer, synthesized the sugars, or some of them, with an infinity of trouble. Eut these same sugars are synthesized as noiselessly as abundantly by every green leaf that basks itself in the sun; so it is with Glycerin. Price’s Company s apparatus is one method of making it, but nature has another. In 1858 Pasteur* shewed that Glycerin always occurs as a by-product in the alcoholic fermentation of sugar, the amount being 3 per cent, of the sugar used. From this it follows that no bottle of port becomes crusted in the wine cellar without Glycerin being formed. Some wines contain as much as 1 per cent, of Glycerin, the amount of Glycerin present being a test of the age and of the completeness of the fermenta- tion of the wine. To pursue this subject further would lead us beyond our present purpose; but this fact is worthy of mention, shewing, as it does, that Glycerin, which, as we shall see later, is one of the strongest preservatives, that is, antiseptics, known, is formed as a product of the life processes of organisms to whose activity the fermentation of sugar into alcohol is due. In other words, these organisms produce exactly that substance which, when present in sufficient proportion, kills them. However important a product Glycerin may be in the life-history of low organisms, it, or at least its immediate allies, is probably no less so in the economy of the higher animals. Recent researches tend to shew that the compound of Glycerin with phosphoric acid, C3 Hs (0H)Z PO4 H2, is the starting-point to which a number of highly complex constituents of the brain may be referred as derivative, and to which they tend when they decompose. An introduction to an essay on Glycerin would hardly be complete without the mention of dynamite. It will be, perhaps, interesting to the general reader to know that, however intimate this substance may be with the anarchist, it is equally well acquainted with the physician. The physician constantly uses Nitro-Glycerin, which is the active ingredient of dynamite, for the purpose of lessening the work an abnormal or badly-nourished heart has to do. The way in which this result is brought about by Nitro-Glycerin is, that it causes the arteries, or the muscular * Comptes Rendits, 46-857 and 47, 224.