THE ALUMNI JOURNAL Ul 



KARL WILHELM SCHEELE, THE PHARMACIST. 



W^ith much interest did I read the excellent biography of 

 "Scheele, the Chemist,"* by Victor Robinson. The study of phar- 

 maceutical, chemical and medical history is a most interesting one, 

 but, unfortunately, is sadly neglected. Let us hope that the time is 

 not far distant when these studies will be included in the curriculum 

 of the colleges, and then, and not until then, in my opinion, will we 

 plant the seed in the student which will germinate into that great 

 necessity, i. e., the love of his profession. 



Permit me, however, to take one important exception to the ex- 

 cellent paper, "Scheele, the Chemist," that is, Scheele should not 

 be classed as a chemist, but as a pharmacist or better, as an apothe- 

 cary Pharmacy rightly claims Karl Wilhelm Scheele as belonging 

 to its ranks, because he has made all liis great discoveries as an 

 humble apothecary. 



Beginning with the preparation of phosphorus from bone and the 

 isolation of tartaric acid from cream of tartar in 1769, at the age of 

 only 2y years, to the important discovery of the "sweet principle of 

 oils," the glycerin of to-day, and also the discovery of hydrocyanic 

 acid, both in 1783, of citric acid and the "acid of sugar," the present 

 oxalic acid in 1784, of malic acid in 1785 and of gallic acid in 1786, 

 . he year of his early death, the discoveries of Scheele consisted prin- 

 cipally of pharmaceutical products and were epoch making events 

 in pharmacy. 



The name of Scheele is furthermore intimately associated with 

 manganese and barium, with arsenic, tungsten and molybdenium 

 and combinations, with calomel, prussian blue and plumbago, with 

 benzoic, lactic, phosphoric and uric acids, with ether and acetic 

 ether and even with our modern sterilization, having applied this 

 method for the successful preservation of vinegar as early as 1782 

 and recommending its application for pharmaceutical purposes. 



Mother Pharmaciae is also justly proud of her son, because, unlike 

 others, i. e., Liebig, he did not desert her. He refused lucrative of- 

 fers from England and kept on experimenting in his obscure apoth- 

 ecary shop at Koeping, on the western shore of Lake Maelar, where 

 he died, only 42 years old, as a pharmacist. 



Unlike the modern chemist, Scheele was without any apparatus 

 and he was compelled to construct same himself, wherein his phar- 



*April, 1910, Alumni Journal. 



