Some early chemical analyses of proprietary medicines.

Abstract

E ARLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY several attempts were made to disclose the compositions of secret remedies, but the performance rarely matched the promise. The first volume of the Monthly Gazette of Health (1816) was largely devoted to exposing "the nefarious practices of pretenders, who, for the sake of lucre, sport with the feelings and lives of their fellow creatures."' Analysis would enable the public to distinguish those preparations which possessed merit from those which were inert or even dangerous, and in this respect the editor, Richard Reece (who sold family medicine chests and portable laboratories from his Medical Hall in Piccadilly, London), claimed that the Gazette would be superior to all other publications. Yet within a few pages Reece was compelled to hedge. "It is necessary to observe that in the analysis of a proprietary medicine composed of vegetable products, it is not possible to discover all its constituent parts by any chemical means. Of mineral preparations we can speak with more accuracy."2 Metals and common acid radicals could indeed be detected with some certainty, for such exponents of inorganic qualitative analysis as Torbern Bergman, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin had learned their trade in that most difficult field of ore and stone analysis. And with the appearance of the textbooks of Carl Remigius Fresenius and Heinrich Rose, systematic group analysis was securely founded.3 The identification of vegetable products in mixtures was far less satisfactory. The work of the eighteenth-century French chemists on the analysis of plant parts by destructive distillation was directed less toward identification than toward understanding plant constitution. More promising was the water extraction method, known as maceration, infusion, or decoction, according to whether the water was cold, warm, or boiling. Andrew Ure used these methods to separate various vegetable constituents (Table 1), but they were then to be distinguished only by appearance, taste, or solubility in acid, alkali, water, or alcohol.4