394 
PHARMACEUTICAL MEETING. 
I invariably use when Liq. Opii Sed. is ordered. It may be regarded as a 
suggested improvement of Ext. Opii Liq., B.P. 
The Chairman, in inviting discussion on this paper, remarked, that the pre¬ 
paration of a Liquor Opii that should be uniform in strength and composition, 
involved considerable difficulty, and they could not draw a just conclusion as to 
the value of the product obtained by the process given, without taking into ac¬ 
count the great variation that occurred in different samples of opium. The 
quality of the opium, he thought, should be made the basis of any good process, 
for while differences occurred in the amount of morphia contained in different 
samples of opium to the extent of 200 per cent., there could be no uniformity 
where this was overlooked. Some samples of opium did not yield more than 
half an ounce of morphia from a pound, while other samples yielded two ounces. 
The use of carbonate of lime, as proposed, would, no doubt, tend to produce 
shortly what might otherwise be effected by evaporation, but he did not think 
that any such method was pursued in making the original Battley’s solution, 
which he had reason to believe was simply an aqueous extract of good opium, 
the meconic acid of which was, to a great extent, destroyed in the process of 
evaporation. The free meconic acid and much of the extractive matter were 
thus got rid of, the latter being rendered insoluble. The great difficulty of all, 
however, was to get a normal opium that could be relied upon. The question 
had been asked, “What is opium-and this question was not so easily 
answered. He had had something to do with it during his lifetime, and some¬ 
times he had thought that he knew something about it, but he believed there 
was still a great deal that remained to be made out, and even then there would 
be the difficulty that it was never twice alike. He had recently had some opium 
under his notice which had been made in Australia. He knew it to be perfectly 
genuine ; it was of great beauty, as far as its external characters were con¬ 
cerned ; it had the perfect odour of good opium, and it dissolved with the Per¬ 
sian character ; but, singular to say, it contained very little morphia, but a 
great abundance of the other principles known to exist in opium. 
Mr. Wood said that a few months ago he was making experiments, with a 
view to ascertain the best method of producing liquor opii, and he was led to 
follow a suggestion thrown out by Dr. Redwood, in a lecture delivered before 
the Society some time ago, on Dialysis. In that lecture, Dr. Redwood sug¬ 
gested it might be possible to introduce a class of preparations called Diffusates, 
prepared from the crude drugs by the process of diffusion; and in the lecture, 
lie (Dr. Redwood) exhibited a solution of opium which was called diffusate of 
opium. When he (Mr. Wood) was making the experiments to which he re¬ 
ferred, he resorted to this process of diffusion as a likely one to yield a good 
liquor opii; and although, from want of time, he was not able to follow out 
these experiments with sufficient detail and accuracy, yet he succeeded generally 
in obtaining a liquor opii by a simple method of diffusion, which gave micro¬ 
scopically, so far as he could judge, a better crystallization than any other 
method that he tried. He tried the method which the Chairman had referred 
to, of repeatedly evaporating solution of opium, redissolving the extract, and 
again evaporating, and so on, until the resinous and extractive matter had been 
in a great measure separated, and that gave also a good crystallization. But it 
appeared to him that diffusion was in some respects the preferable method; 
certainly it subjected the opium to less heat, and that might be advantageous. 
He simply prepared a large ordinary floating dialyser standing in a pan of 
water, and put ordinary solution of opium into that, and left it for some days 
to diffuse. He changed the water twice or three times, and evaporated the 
whole diffusate, and thus obtained a kind of treacle, in which he determined the 
quantity of morphia by analysis ; and then he diluted that up to such a strength 
that the liquor contained four grains of morphia to a fluid ounce. 
