Chronicles of Pharmacy, Vol. 2 (of 2)Wootton, A. C.
History
Chronicles of Pharmacy, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Wootton, A. C.
Pharmacy -- History
Nathaniel Godbold’s Vegetable Balsam was patented in 1785, Spilsbury’s
Anti-scorbutic Drops in 1792, Ching’s Worm Lozenges in 1796, and
Innocenza della Lena winds up the century with a formula conceived
quite on the lines of the pharmacy then departing. It was for “A
certain medicine called flogistical and fixed earth of Mars or
powder of Mars.” It is not stated what the medicine was for, but its
preparation was awe-inspiring. Mineral earth of iron, copper, crude
antimony, mineral salt, and urine were digested for a considerable
time in an unvarnished vessel, hermetically sealed, deep down in the
earth. Subsequently the mixture was exposed to the rays of the sun for
a period, more urine was added, and the interment and the exposure were
several times repeated.
Roche’s Embrocation for whooping-cough, patented in 1803, was declared
to be compounded of oil of elder, rose leaves, chamomile flowers, oil
of caraway, oil of rosemary, cochineal, and alkanet root. This remedy
is still popular, but it is understood to have a composition very
different from that specified.
Perkins’s Metallic Tractors were patented on March 10th, 1798. Benjamin
Douglas Perkins claimed to have discovered “an art of relieving and
curing a variety of aches, pains, and diseases in the human body,
by drawing over the parts affected or those contiguous thereto, in
certain directions, various pointed metals, which from the affinity
they have with the offending matter,” or from some other cause,
“extract, or draw out the same, and thus cure the patient.” The
metals used were combinations of copper, zinc, and gold; or of iron,
silver, and platinum. The tractors were invented by Elisha Perkins,
the father of Benjamin, who died at New York in 1799. The tractors
were united together like a pair of compasses, and one of the arms
was obtuse and the other pointed. They professed to apply galvanic
action to the relief and cure of pain and disease. Galvani’s report of
his experiments was only published about 1790, and not much earlier
Mesmer’s animal magnetism had excited marvellous interest in Paris.
Perkins’s Tractors had an enormous popularity for a time in England and
in Denmark, but nowhere else to any extent. Two Bath doctors, named
Falconer and Haygarth, professed to get as good results with tractors
made of wood, many patients of the Bath Hospital declaring that these
promptly relieved their pains. From these experiments it was argued
that the alleged cures were entirely due to the imagination of the
sufferers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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