April 8, 1871.] 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
801 
THE CHEMICAL NOMENCLATURE OF 
THE PHARMACOPOEIA, 
WITH SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS REVISION* 
BY PROFESSOR ATTFIELD. 
The vocabulary of technical terms, or nomen* 
clature, of a pharmacopoeia is chemical, botanical, 
zoological and galenical. In the following paper 
chemical nomenclature is alone considered. 
Introductory remarks. —The chemical nomencla¬ 
ture of the current Pharmacopoeias is mainly scien¬ 
tific, founded on theory, and therefore liable to 
change. Its one great fault, in relation to medicine 
and pharmacy, is mutability. A fault, and a great 
fault, because the life and health of people are 
largely dependent on the perfect understanding 
which should always subsist between physician and 
pharmacist respecting names of medicines which 
the former prescribes and the latter prepares. But 
it is a fault which cannot altogether be avoided. 
For a name is seldom given haphazard; it is com¬ 
monly designed to express our ideas regarding a 
thing or substance, and as those ideas are de¬ 
veloped and extended, our point of view or theory 
respecting them necessarily changes; the old name 
is no longer consistent with our knowledge, and 
must therefore be also changed. Moreover, there is 
a limit to the power of language, and desirable as 
may be a system of names for remedial agents which 
shall be fixed, abiding, permanent, the production of 
such a system in the present state of knowledge is 
altogether impossible. What, then, are pharma¬ 
cists, medical practitioners and others to do when 
chemical names they have accepted on authority 
are, by the same authority, modified or abandoned ? 
Within the last few years the views hitherto pre¬ 
vailing of the constitution of matter have under¬ 
gone radical alteration, being no longer consistent 
with ascertained truths, and the nomenclature or 
language embodying those views has, of course, 
shared the fate of the theories. Under these cir¬ 
cumstances, by what principles are we to be guided 
in adopting for medicine, pharmacy and the Phar¬ 
macopoeia, such names as, on the one hand, shall 
be perfectly explicit, readily understood, unambi¬ 
guous; and, on the other, consistent, or at least 
harmonious with prevailing chemical theories as ex¬ 
pressed in the educational literature of the science ? 
For not only is it to be remembered that changes 
must be expected in pliarmacopoeial names because 
we have already adopted and employ a nomencla¬ 
ture which, in the nature of things, is liable to 
change; but we must bear in mind that the succes¬ 
sors to men now in practice are learning chemistry 
by aid of the new hypotheses, and their progress is 
impeded by old forms of language and by the erro¬ 
neous notions which that language imparts. This 
state of things cannot continue; the march of science 
has ever been aided, never hindered by medicine or 
pharmacy. But what position are we to take in 
respect to this subject? The question is one that 
demands careful attention. I have endeavoured to 
answer it myself, and now venture to give to others 
the train of thought I have followed, and the con¬ 
clusions at which I have arrived. 
Outline of the paper. —I intend, firstly, to outline 
the history and present position of the chemical 
* Read at the Evening Meeting of the Pharmaceutical So 
riety of Great Britain, April 5, 1871. 
Third Series, No. 41. 
names already employed in Pharmacopoeias, espe¬ 
cially the British, and to glance at the causes of the 
recent revolution in chemical nomenclature; and to 
do so, not by way of aiding the followers of medicine 
to criticize matters purely chemical, hut to enable 
them to arrive at sound conclusions respecting the 
application of modern chemical nomenclature to 
pharmacy. I shall then shortly allude to chemical 
notation, which is inseparably connected with my 
subject ; mention disadvantages attending altera¬ 
tions in chemical names; state the functions and 
positive or negative qualities which names should 
possess; give a complete list of current pharma- 
copoeial names, with the names now proposed, and 
their scientific synonyms; and finally refer to names 
requiring special or exceptional treatment. 
History and present position of the chemical names 
of the Pharmacopoeia. —The system of nomenclature 
hitherto accepted from chemists by pharmacists, 
practitioners in medicine and the public, that which 
is employed in European and American pharma¬ 
copoeias, was mainly devised by Lavoisier, eighty- 
four years ago. The fundamental principle on which 
it was founded was, that the name of a salt should 
express its composition. The many animal and 
vegetable substances discovered since that time 
(notably alkaloids and neutral crystalline principles) 
are designated, perhaps fortunately, by unsystematic 
names, names which, at all events, are not liable to 
change, and which may therefore be omitted from 
consideration in this paper. The great majority of 
chemical substances employed in pharmacy are such 
mineral salts as were known to Lavoisier, and their 
names were given by him on the assumption that 
they contained, on the one hand, an undecomposable 
body, generally a metal, common to a whole class 
of salts (the compounds of copper, for example), 
and on the other, a body, or a group of elements, 
also common to a number of salts {sulphates, for ex¬ 
ample). Soda, potash, lime, baryta, magnesia and 
alumina were then considered to be elements; hence, 
as I shall further show presently, such names as 
carbonate of soda, nitrate of potash and sulphate of 
baryta were perfectly consistent with those of car¬ 
bonate of iron, nitrate of mercury, sulphate of 
copper. During the twenty j^ears succeeding 1787, 
Lavoisier’s views of the constitution of salts and the 
language or nomenclature in which those views found 
expression, were generally accepted throughout 
Europe. Green vitriol, blue vitriol, Glauber’s salt 
and gypsum, for example, were considered to con¬ 
tain, on the one hand, the “elements” iron, copper, 
soda, and lime respectively, and, on the other, a 
group of elements common to each of the four com¬ 
pounds ; the four different elements were indicated 
in the spoken and written nomenclature of the com¬ 
pounds by their four names, ‘iron, copper, soda, 
lime,’ while the one group and its presence in each 
of the four compounds was indicated in the spoken 
and written nomenclature of the compounds by the 
word ‘ sulphate ’; sulphate of iron, sulphate of copper, 
sulphate of soda, sulphate of lime. This change 
from such trivial names as green vitriol, blue vitriol, 
Glauber’s salt and gypsum to the systematic che¬ 
mical names sulphate of iron, sulphate of copper, 
sulphate of soda, sulphate of lime, seems to have 
been effected without much opposition. At that time 
comparatively few persons were interested in, or 
affected by the matter, and radical changes of this 
kind are made with less difficulty by the few than 
