Volume 1

Drugs and medicines of North America : a publication devoted to the historical and scientific discussion of botany, pharmacy, chemistry and therapeutics of the medical plants of North America, their constituents, products and sophistications ... v. 1-2; [Apr. 1884-June 1887].

Date:
1884-1887. [Cincinnati, Lloyd Library, 1930-31]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drugs and medicines of North America : a publication devoted to the historical and scientific discussion of botany, pharmacy, chemistry and therapeutics of the medical plants of North America, their constituents, products and sophistications ... v. 1-2; [Apr. 1884-June 1887]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    FOREWORD. By Edward Kremers, Ph. D. In the fall of 1884 the writer matriculated at the Philadelphia Col- lege of Pharmacy as a junior student; in the fall of 1885 as a senior phar- macy student in the recently established Department of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin. During the academic year 1886-87 he acted as Professor Power’s assistant. It was during these three years, when a young man is said to be more impressionable than during any other period of his life, that Drugs and Medicines of North America by J. U. and C. G. Lloyd made its appearance in fascicle form. While acting as Professor Power’s assistant, the writer was initiated into the fascinating field of phytochemical research. The results of the year’s work were incorporated in two papers which professor Power sent to the Cincinnati meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association. They were read by Professor John Uri Lloyd. The connection between these two men had previously been established through their common interest in the alkaloids of hydrastis. In 1884 Power had published a paper “On Hydrastine” in the Proceedings of the American Phar- maceutical Association. Moreover, the writer recalls being shown handsome specimens of large crystals of hydrastine made by Lloyd and sent to Dr. Power. He was also told that the senior editor of “Drugs and Medicines” had inquired of Dr. Power for further information. Thus a connection, though indirect, had also been established between the investigator of American medicinal plants at Cincinnati and the novice, who had tried his newly acquired knowledge and skill in the study of a single American plant at Madison, long before they met at the White Mountain Meeting in the Profile House in 1892. It is for this reason that this foreword naturally drifts into a personal relation. The first edition of Pharmacographia by Flueckiger and Hanbury had appeared in 1874, the second in 1879. While American medicinal plants had by no means been ignored, the rapid development of American vegetable materia medica seemed to call for either a supplement or a treatise of its own. Schoepf, the Hessian army surgeon, after the War of Independence, had explored the North American flora and had written a Materia Medica Americana in 1787, reprinted as a Bulletin of the Lloyd Library in 1902 or 1903. However, this contained but brief botanical descriptions. Bartram and his students at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania had published a number of monographs in which the chemical constituents of the plants as well as their therapeutic action