Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier.

  • Achilles Rose
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    devoted to the upholding of the phlogistic the- ory, which his own experiments (and their com- pletion by Cavendish) by a strange fate were destined in the hands of Lavoisier completely to overturn. On August I, 1774, at Lansdowne House, Priestley discovered oxygen. By the heating of oxid of mercury he obtained what was to him a new gas, in which a candle burned vigor- ously. He later on found it purer than ordi- nary air, /.^., to support respiration, as well as combustion, better, and called it dephlogisti- cated air. From its property of yielding acid compounds this gas was named oxygen by Lavoisier at a later date. As it both came from the atmosphere and would also be pro- duced by heating certain metallic nitrates, Priestley concluded that the air is not an element, but consists of the nitrous (nitric) acid and earth, with so much phlogiston as is necessary to its elasticity. Priestley's great discovery of oxygen contained the germ of the modern science of chemistry, but, owing to his blind faith in the phlogiston theory, the [37]