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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    significance of the discovery was lost upon him. Priestley made the first public announcement of his discovery of oxygen in a letter to Sir John Pringle, dated March 15, 1775, which was read to the Royal Society on May 25. But while in Paris, in October, 1774, Priestley, ac- cording to his own account, spoke of the exper- iments he had already performed, and of those he meant to perform, in relation to the new gas. Fifteen years later—in the 1790 edition of Experiments on Air—Priestley declared specifically that he told Lavoisier of his exper- iments during his visit to Paris. There is no doubt that immediately after that date Lavoisier made oxygen for himself, and in May following published the first of a long series of memoirs, in which he used his experiments to explain the constitution of air, combustion, and respiration, the Greek idea of the conservation of matter, thus founding chemistry on a new basis. Priestley refused to accept Lavoisier's sagacious views. The centenary of Priestley's discovery of [38]
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