Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 1).djvu/382

 the first in the field, so far as is known. His report was published in the "Chemische Anmerkungen" in 1721. He gave it in three-grain doses, and reported that it had a calmative effect! Subsequently it was tried in various diseases by continental practitioners. Mentz commended it in colic, Langensalz in asthenic fevers, Bonneken in tetanus, Wetkard in apoplexy, and Trampel in gout.

In 1769 Alphonse Leroy, of Paris, reported a curious experience. He was sent for to a patient apparently on the point of death from phthisis. Seeing that the case was hopeless, he prepared and administered a placebo of sugared water. Calling the next day, Leroy found his patient somewhat revived, and on examining the sugar which he had used for his solution, he found that some phosphorus had been kept in it for a long time. The patient was much too far gone to recover, but she survived for fifteen days, and Leroy attributed this amelioration to the phosphorised water which he had accidentally given her.

Gahn discovered phosphorus in the bones in 1768, and in 1779 another German chemist named Hensing ascertained its presence in a fatty matter which he extracted from the brain. Medical theories were naturally based on these observations. Couerbe, a French chemist quoted by Dr. Churchill, wrote thus in 1830:

"The want of phosphorus in the brain would reduce man to the sad condition of the brute; an excess of this element irritates the nervous system, excites the individual, and throws him into that terrible state of disturbance called madness, or mental alienation; a moderate proportion gives rise to the sublimest ideas, and produces that admirable harmony which spiritualists call the soul."

British practitioners took but very little notice of phosphorus as a remedy in the first century of its