34 
Maceration  and  Percolation. 
J  Am.  Jour.  Pharni. 
\    January,  19KJ. 
chemistry,  etc.,  was  indeed  a  great  one,  and  A.  N.  Scherer  in  his 
memoir  "  Theophrastus  Paracelsus"  (St.  Petersburg,  1821)  rightly 
says :  "  Pharmacy  owes  everything  to  Paracelsus." 
In  olden  times  the  apothecary  collected  his  own  drugs,  roots, 
herbs,  flowers,  etc.,  in  the  proper  season,  and  he  himself  prepared 
his  waters  and  spirits  by  distillation  and  his  tinctures  by  maceration. 
The  collection  of  drugs  by  the  apothecary  kept  him  in  touch  with 
botany  and  pharmacognosy  and  was  especially  very  educational  to 
the  young  pharmacist  and  is  far  superior  to  the  selling  of  herbs, 
flowers,  and  even  roots  of  doubtful  value  in  pressed  packages,  as 
practiced  by  the  average  druggist  of  to-day.  The  old  apothecary 
carried  on  this  maceration  in  glass  bottles  or  jars  in  the  front  win- 
dow of  his  shop,  so  that  the  sun  would  strike  and  thereby  warm 
the  preparations.  The  resulting  different  colored  tinctures  very 
correctly  can  be  styled  as  giving  origin  to  the  colored  show  bottles 
in  our  windows  to-day. 
I  beg  to  remind  the  users  and  advocaters  of  maceration  that  agi- 
tation must  not  be  forgotten,  and  I  know  as  a  fact  that  it  is  very 
often  forgotten  in  this  process.  For  obvious  reasons  frequent  agi- 
tation, at  least  once  a  day,  is  essential.  It  might  be  of  interest  to 
learn  that  the  second  edition  of  the  Netherland  Pharmacopoeia  1871, 
in  the  preparation  of  its  tinctures  even  ordered  continual  agitation 
("agitatio  continua")  for  7  to  28  days!  If  our  admirers  of  this 
so-called  simple  and  labor-saving  maceration  would  have  to  prac- 
tice the  Dutch  method,  then  I  believe  they  would  soon  reach  a  dif- 
ferent conclusion. 
Expression  must  necessarily  go  hand  in  hand  with  maceration, 
especially  in  the  case  of  bulky  drugs,  as  f .  i.  arnica  flowers,  in  order 
to  remove  the  liquid  from  the  marc  as  much  as  possible.  This, 
however,  can  never  be  accomplished  entirely,  and  the  retention  of 
strong  menstruum  in  the  marc  and  the  resulting  indefinite  finished 
preparation  are  the  chief  objections  to  the  process  of  maceration. 
To  overcome  these,  several  pharmacopoeias,  the  Hungarian,  the 
Rumanian,  the  British,  and  the  U.  S.,  order  the  expressed  marc  to 
be  remacerated  with  menstruum  and  then  to  be  expressed  again 
so  as  also  to  obtain  a  definite  quantity  of  the  finished  preparation, 
as  f.  i.  in  Tinctura  Arnicae  U.S. P.  VIII.  As  the  resulting  liquid 
will  be  very  turbid  it  must,  last  of  all,  be  filtered.  So  you  can 
readily  see  that  the  so-called  simple  process  of  maceration  consists 
of  maceration,  agitation,  expression,  remaceration,  and  filtration, 
not  so  simple  after  all. 
