142 
ORIGINAL AND EXTRACTED ARTICLES. 
ON THE PROCESS FOR PREPARING JAMES’S POWDER. 
BY MICHAEL DONOVAN, ESQ., 
HONORARY MEMBER OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF PHILADELPHIA, ETC. ETC. 
More than two centuries ago a medicine was in repute made by burning 
shavings of hartshorn or of bones along with sulphuret of antimony, and con¬ 
tinually raking or stirring them together until the sulphur was burnt off, and 
the powder had become light grey or ash-coloured. It was known as Liles 
and Schawanberg’s fever powder, and was much used about the middle of the 
seventeenth century. . , . . « , 
In 1746, Dr. Robert James, a physician of talent and eminent learning, find¬ 
ing the powder to be an excellent medicine, and having made a trifling alteration 
in the process of preparing it, secured a right to the exclusive manufacture by a 
patent. The conditions of obtaining a patent were that the petitioner shall 
make oath that he is the sole inventor, and that he has deposited in Chancery a 
true and precise specification of the mode of producing the article for vhic Q 
seeks the monopoly. But Dr. James was not the sole inventor nor did his 
specification disclose his process; nor could the powder, thenceforward called 
“ James’s Powder,” be prepared by the means which he pretended were suffi¬ 
cient: he conceived that his best security was secrecy. Dr. James, therefore, 
virtually had no patent right. . . - 
For a long series of years nothing was certainly known of the composition of 
the powder until the investigation was undertaken by Dr. George Pearson, who 
in 1791 gave an account of it to the Royal Society, in a communication which 
was published in the 1 Philosophical Transactions. _ 
A medicine founded on the experiments of Pearson, and intended as a substi¬ 
tute for James’s Powder, was introduced into the London Pharmacopoeia of 
1788 under the name of Pulvis Antimonialis. It was accordingly used by apothe¬ 
caries as a succedaneum on account of the high price of the real James s 
powder: but it never obtained the confidence of practitioners; and hence the 
origin of the adjunct used in prescriptions, verus. Indeed it never deserved 
their confidence, being, as directed in the Pharmacopoeia, an almost inert sub- 
Dr. Pearson informs us that all the parcels of James’s powder that lie had 
seen would be called white powders, but no two of them were white in the same 
degree : they had either “ a shade of yellow or stone colour, and none were per¬ 
fectly white, or so white as some specimens of Pulvis Antimonialis of the shops. 
Some parcels had a brassy taste, others no taste. Dr. Pearson haying formed a 
powder from bone-ashes and crude sulphuret of antimony possessed of properties 
similar in kind to every one of those ascertained to belong to James s powder, 
with scarcely any difference in the degree of them considered that they were 
the same. Beside this synthetic proof, he adduced the evidence of analysis, and 
made experiments in proof before competent judges. He sajs, t is veiy 
probable that no degree or duration of fire applied m open or close vessels alone 
can produce a calx of the same kind as that in James s powder, nor, perhaps 
can such a powder be composed by fire applied in close vessels to calx of anti¬ 
mony mixed with calcined bone ; but if calx of antimony, duly calcined, be 
mixed with calcined bone, and exposed to air, in a due degree of fire, for a suf¬ 
ficient length of time, and then a still greater degree of fire be applied to it in 
close vessels, such a compound may be formed as James’s powder. . .. . JNo sucfi 
white powder is formed by a mixture of any calx of antimony and bone ashes, 
