A supplement to the pharmacopoeia : being a treatise on pharmacology in general; including not only the drugs and compounds which are used by practitioners of medicine, but also those which are sold by chemists, druggists, and herbalists, for other purposes; together with a collection of the most useful medical formulæ ; an explanation of the contractions used by physicians and druggists; the medical arrangement of the articles of the London pharmacopeia, with their doses, at one view; a similar list of the indigenous plants of the British islands, which are capable of being used in medicine, &c. ; and also a very copious index, English and Latin, of the various names by which the articles have been known at different periods. / by Samuel Frederick Gray.

  • Gray, Samuel Frederick, 1766-1828.
Date:
1821
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A supplement to the pharmacopoeia : being a treatise on pharmacology in general; including not only the drugs and compounds which are used by practitioners of medicine, but also those which are sold by chemists, druggists, and herbalists, for other purposes; together with a collection of the most useful medical formulæ ; an explanation of the contractions used by physicians and druggists; the medical arrangement of the articles of the London pharmacopeia, with their doses, at one view; a similar list of the indigenous plants of the British islands, which are capable of being used in medicine, &c. ; and also a very copious index, English and Latin, of the various names by which the articles have been known at different periods. / by Samuel Frederick Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    other people, shutting their eyes to the defeetsof an article, so that they can enjoy the delight of getting it cheap; and, secondly, for those persons, who being but bad paymasters, yet, as the druggist for his own credit cannot charge more than the usual price of the article, he must therefore dete- riorate it in value to make up for the risk he runs, and the long credit he must give. Having thus explained what may be found in this work, it remains to say a few words upon some circumstances con- nected with the general nature of it. A frequent source of error arises from the weights with which the apothecaries ought to compound their medicines being different from that by which they buy and sell, so that they should have both piles, whereas, the gold and silver smiths, who also use the Troy, not only compound, but also buy and sell by it, and therefore require only that pile. Some schemers have proposed to remedy this by introducing a new pile decimally divided, but this would only increase the confusion, unless we could suppose, that a legislative act, like the waving of a magician's wand, or the stroke of a harlequin's sword, could change all the old authors to the new standard: and both the ponderal scales would be very awkward to reduce to the decimal standard, which has the inconvenience of having only two divisors without remainders, viz. 2 and 5; as well the avoirdupois, which seems to have been formed by the common traders, from the continual bi- section of a horse-load, taking a new integer whenever the fractional expression became inconvenient; as the Troy, which seems to be a scientific weight, invented in the hierar- chal colleges of Iran or Egypt, by the multiplication of the weight of some standard seed little liable to variation, by twelve, its multiples or aliquot parts, those numbers being- chosen, that the integers thence arising might admit of as many divisors as possible without remainders being left. II it were thought absolutely necessary to have the ponderal and arithmetical scales the same, it would be far easier to in- troduce a duodenary and even a hexadenary scale of nota- tion, which would improve arithmetic, and merely oblige persons of education to learn a couple of new multiplication tables, than to alter the weight to which the common people have been accustomed. It is, however, only when the com- mon pound of sixteen ounces is inadvertently taken for the Troy pound of twelve ounces that the error in respect to tlir