Inaugural address / delivered by Edith Pechey, October 1st, 1877.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Inaugural address / delivered by Edith Pechey, October 1st, 1877. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    teenth) century.* About 1816, however, Frauenhofer discovered the art of making achromatic lenses. In 1823 the first achromatic microscope in France was presented to the Institute by M. Selligue, and since then each year has seen the publication of the most brilliant researches in normal and pathological histo- logy. Chemistry, as a science, may surely be said to date from the discovery of oxygen by Priestley and Schecle in 1774, whilst De Candolle, the author of the Natural System of the Classification of Plants, was born in 1778, the same year in which Linnaeus, the framer of the old artificial method, died. Goethe's philosophical contribution to the Science of Botany, his paper upon the Metamorphosis of Plants, appeared in 179,0. With regard to the Materia Medica, one can only come to the conclusion, in looking over the Herbals of last century, that the end aimed at by the compilers 'of the London Dispensatory was that of getting as many ingredients as possible in each compound,f whilst the accuracy of the therapeutical knowledge of that day may be judged of by reading in the works of a physician of that period that the balsam of tolu is equally efficacious in asthma, con- sumption, palsy, dyspepsia, weakness of the spleen, swellings under the ears, the king's evil, and, when * Spriiche in Prosa. Ueber naturwissenschaft. f See Pechey's Herbal, London, 1707, pp. 218, 318, etpassim. The Magisterial Water of Worms of the London Dispensatory, contained eighteen ingredients, including worms and snails (!), whilst another preparation, Diasatyrion, was compounded of twenty-nine different drugs.
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