History of homoeopathy : its origin, its conflicts ; with an appendix on the present state of University medicine / by Wilhelm Ameke, M.D. (of Berlin) ; translated by Alfred E. Drysdale ; edited by R. E. Dudgeon.

  • Ameke, Wilhelm, 1847-
Date:
1885
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of homoeopathy : its origin, its conflicts ; with an appendix on the present state of University medicine / by Wilhelm Ameke, M.D. (of Berlin) ; translated by Alfred E. Drysdale ; edited by R. E. Dudgeon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    cribed in Crell's Annalen* Three of the foremost French chemists, Thouret, Lavoisier and Fourcroy, propose an arsenicated liver of sulphur, such as had long been found quite inadequate in Germany. The directions for ascer- taining the quantity present are very circumstantial. Forty to sixty pounds of wine are evaporated to dryness ; a furnace is necessary in order to obtain lead in the metallic form; a part is reduced to ashes, various salts are required, &c Finally, in order to be quite sure, this and that must be done. These experiments must be repeated and comparisons instituted with good wines in order to be able to arrive at trustworthy conclusions. Hahnemann used hardly half a wine glassful of wine and one minute sufficed for a reliable qualitative investigation. He made a quantitative analysis by dropping in sulphuric acid into wine boiled to a fourth to eighth part of its bulk, by which means a sulphate of lead was precipitated. The dried precipitate is weighed, the amount of sulphate of lead left in solution in the fluid is added, and the calculation is made; 143 grains of this precipitate (sulphate of lead) prove the presence of 100 grains of metallic lead, according to Bergmann. In twenty ounces of fluid one grain of sul- phate of lead remains in solution, which is to be included in the calculation. (The precipitated sulphate was of as little use here as in testing for arsenic, because it is de- composed by drying.) Afterwards he used cream of tartar with the addition of tartaric acid instead of muriatic acid ; but he soon returned to his original method. In 1788, Hahnemann discovered the solubility of such precipitates of metallic sulphates in boiling nitric acid. This process is now employed by chemists in order to dis- tinguish the metallic sulphides which are not soluble by alkaline sulphides (mercury, silver, bismuth, copper, cad- mium) from one another ; it is known that sulphide of mercury is not dissolved by heating with nitric acid, while the others are. * 1792, II., 455—461.