The Elements of Medical Chemistry
Embracing Only Those Branches of Chemical Science which Are Calculated to Illustrate or Explain the Different Objects of Medicine, and to Furnish a Chemical Grammar to the Author's Pharmacologia

An 1825 work on chemistry for medical students, the companion to John Ayrton Paris's best-selling Pharmacologia.

John Ayrton Paris (Author)

9781108069908, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 April 2014

636 pages, 70 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 3.6 cm, 0.8 kg

The physician and author John Ayrton Paris (1785–1856), several of whose other medical and popular works have been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection, published the first edition of his Pharmacologia in 1812. It was immediately successful, and went into eight further editions until 1843. The third edition, of 1820, has been reissued in this series. This book, published in 1825, was intended as a companion volume, providing a 'grammar' of chemistry for the medical student. After an imaginary dialogue on the importance of chemistry, between a provincial physician and 'the author', to whom the former is entrusting his son for his medical education, the book moves systematically from the general application of chemistry to medicine, through topics such as gravity, crystallization and electricity, to the detail of the actions of specific elements, and tables of relevant weights and measures, providing fascinating insights into the history of medical education.

A dialogue
Part I: 1. Elements of chemical science
2. Of matter, and its properties
3. Attraction
4. Of specific gravity
5. Contiguous attraction
6. Cohesion
7. Chemical affinity
8. On heat or caloric
9. Light
10. Electricity and its chemical agencies
Part II: 1. On elementary bodies, and the compounds which result from their combination with each other
2. Water
3. The atmosphere
4. Muriatic acid
5. Iodine
6. Nitric acid
7. Ammonia
8. Prussic acid
9. Sulphur
10. Phosphorus
11. Metals
12. Salts
Part III: 1. Organic chemistry
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Chemistry [PN]