Observations on medical weights and measures.

  • Wilson, Charles.
Date:
[1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on medical weights and measures. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    became inclined to approach those who had been so perseveringly retreating from them. By thi'owing aside their own chosen troy standard, and adopting the avoirdupois standard, as that towards which there existed elsewhere a universal leaning, now also more immediately sanctioned by law, they sought to obtain through a concession, thus in apparent harmony with the tendencies of the times otherwise, freedom from that confusion and intermingling of weights which had for so long brought doubt and tarnish on the functions of pharmacy, in the eyes of those who were at once the most deeply interested and the most deeply versed in its proceedings. The first, and, in some degree, perhaps the unconscious step in this direction, was that made by the Royal College of Physicians of Lon- don, in 1836, when it adopted the imperial measure, expressly based on the avoirdupois standard by the then recent enactment, as its rule for the dispensing of liquids. There might have been, and there doubt- less were, other grounds for this innovation, in the circumstance that there already existed, with regard to our liquid measures, other ano- malies of a nature in great part independent of those to which we have as yet alluded. Though the pint hitherto in use had been long called the pound, and this had been rated at 16 oz., there was not, in fact, any known liquor a pint measure of which answered to that weight. If we took rectified spirit as our standard, a pint of it exceeded a troy pound by above half an ounce: if we took water, the excess was upwards of three ounces. Then, as this pound could not, manifestly, be the equivalent of the troy pound, containing only 12 oz., so, alike manifestly, neither could the ounce be the equivalent of the troy ounce.^ The former pint of the London Pharmacopoeia was computed to measure 28-875 cubic inches; and the troy ounce has been estimated at 1-900945 cubic inches. But 16 troy ounces would thus occupy 30-415120 cubic inches, instead of the smaller volume just mentioned. The avoirdupois ounce of water, on the other hand, measuring 1-73298 cubic inches, would, in like number, make up only 27-72768 cubic inches, or more than a cubic inch less than the alleged just quantity. Yet it appears from this clearly, that It was the avoirdupois ounce which approached the nearer, as the basis of this arbitrary pound, or pint, in the former fluid measure. This arose, probably, because the pint in question was undoubtedly i-li^^'^T'^^'^^ to Bishop Hooper (An Inquiry into the State of Ancient Measures, K^i;, a pounds weight of it (troy) in wine or water filled up the primary vesse we call a pint, p. 459. At another place he adds:- Such was the pint 01 old, and the upper measures from it. And for the imder parts of it, they are still measured with the apothecaries by troy ounces, drachms, etc ; but when a whole pint is appointed, it is (it seems) commonly dispensed by a pound Aver- ciupoize: and this wants not much of our present wine pint, as it has been SSion TnS -PP«-tment, p. 461 Setting aside the discrekable contusion m other respects, noted here by this emineat authority, it seems ^^erp'o^'udTrofthepint'evcr actually corresponded to om VOL. v.—NO. HI. SEPTEMBER ]85fj. 2 I)