A compendium of food-microscopy with sections on drugs, water, and tobacco / compiled, with additions and revision, from the late Dr. A.H. Hassall's works on food by Edwy Godwin Clayton.

  • Clayton, Edwy Godwin.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A compendium of food-microscopy with sections on drugs, water, and tobacco / compiled, with additions and revision, from the late Dr. A.H. Hassall's works on food by Edwy Godwin Clayton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    which would have proved an effectual bar to persons less energetic and mentally less active.'1 The writer's simultaneously published memoir * epitomizes the mitiation of effectual legislative and other action in this country against the supply of impure water and the adultera- tion of food and drugs; and plainly shows the profound influence of the late Dr. Hassall's inquiries and efforts, in bringing about the sanitary legislation so pressingly needed at the period of his greatest activity. But for his strenuous life, the systematic hygienic analysis of food, water, and drugs would scarcely yet have been organized; nor would it have become in a few decades what now undoubtedly it is—an autonomous science of State-Chemistry, with an ever- widening scope, and a constantly growing importance to the Empire. Those parts of Dr. Hassall's text, included in the following pages, have been revised and re-arranged so far as appeared to be necessary. The amount of revision, of course, was very great: nevertheless the original descriptions have been altered as little as possible. They are plainly worded, and free from the superabundance of botanical detail, and elaborate subdivision, which characterize some of the later books on the same subject. This lucidity of treatment is one of the best features of Dr. Hassall's work. Great elaboration and minute- ness of description, however admirable from the purely scientific point of view, can be carried to such an extent as to be a hindrance to a practical worker, whose main desire, probably, is no more ambitious than to examine ground ginger for added barley-meal, or cacao powder for maize-starch. Additional matter is scattered through the book. The original text in many places has been recast and consider- ably amplified; as in the pages devoted to the parasitic diseases of grains, to mildews and moulds, arrowroots, cocoa, saccharine substances, mustard, annatto and hops. 1 Obituaries in the Analyst and the Medical Press, 1894. 2 'Arthur Hill Hassall, Physician and Sanitary Reformer: A Short History of his Work in Public Hygiene, and of the Movement against the Adulteration of Food and Drugs.' Messrs. Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 190S.