214 
Ernil  Scheffer. 
Ana.  .lour.  Pharm. 
May  1902. 
a  revolution  during  the  thirty-two  years  of  his  incumbency;  prepara- 
tions which,  in  the  early  years  of  his  career  were  made  by  the 
pharmacists,  were  now  supplied  by  manufacturers  ;  the  older  reme- 
dial agents  gave  way  to  new  ones  introduced ;  and,  to  cap  it  all,  the 
city  had  grown,  so  to  speak,  away  from  him,  leaving  but  a  corporal's 
guard  of  his  former  patrons.  Under  these  circumstances  he  could 
not  hope  to  get  an  adequate  offer  for  his  store  as  a  whole,  and  he 
accordingly  resolved  to  sell  out  in  detail.  Ordinarily,  this  would 
mean  to  sell  at  a  sacrifice ;  but  when  the  sale  was  completed,  he 
assured  me  that  he  had  realized  on  all  of  his  stock — offering  only 
that  which  was  of  merchantable  quality — a  fair  wholesale  price,  the 
stock  and  store-appurtenances  being  mainly  purchased  by  the  retail 
pharmacists  of  the  city. 
Up  to  the  year  1870,  our  knowledge  of  the  proteolytic  ferments 
was  very  imperfect,  and  with  the  exception  of  the  impure  products, 
called  "  pepsin,"  none  of  these  ferments  were  employed  in  medi- 
cine. These  pepsins  were  without  exception  produced  from  the 
inner  coating  of  the  stomach  of  herbivorous  animals,  the  Ameri- 
can products  from  beef  stomachs,  the  French  pepsin  from  the  stom- 
ach of  the  sheep — the  latter  being  the  kind  of  pepsin  employed 
almost  exclusively  by  American  practitioners.  Pepsin  being  admin- 
inistered  for  the  purpose  of  restoring  the  impaired  digestive  func- 
tions of  man,  it  occurred  to  Scheffer,  when  entrusted  by  one  of  his 
medical  friends  with  the  problem  of  preparing  it  in  a  liquid  form, 
that  the  stomach  of  an  omnivorous  animal — that  of  the  pig,  for 
instance — would  yield  a  preparation  more  closely  representing  the 
digestive  principle  in  the  stomach  of  omnivorous  man  than  would 
a  similar  preparation  made  from  the  stomachs  of  herbivors.  This 
course  of  reasoning  led  him  to  select  the  mucous  membrane  of  the 
pig's  stomach  as  the  basis  of  his  "  liquid  pepsin,"  his  formula  for  its 
preparation  being  published  by  him  to  the  world  so  soon  as  it  had 
been  determined  to  his  satisfaction  that  this  liquid  possessed  the 
expected  activity. 
But  Scheffer  was  not  the  man  to  rest  satisfied  with  this  achieve- 
ment. He  realized  that  the  crude  methods  recommended  by  the 
French  authorities  ior  preparing  "  dry  pepsin  " — scraping  off  the 
mucous  membrane  from  sheep's  stomachs,  extraction  with  water, 
clarification  with  lead  acetate,  removal  of  excess  of  lead  salt  by 
