Am.  Jour.  Pharm.\ 
December,  1900.  J 
Pharmaceutical  Meeting. 
607 
marked  that  Mr.  Boring  had  pills  of  opium  in  stock  which  were 
twenty  years  old.  It  was  finally  brought  out  that  the  object  of 
prescribing  old  opium  pills  was  not  so  much  due  to  the  fact  that 
they  did  not  induce  nausea  because  of  a  loss  of  nauseating  principles, 
but  rather  to  the  fact  that  they  are  less  easily  dissolved  and  do  not 
have  an  effect  until  they  reach  the  intestines. 
Mr.  Wiegand  furnished  some  interesting  notes  connected  with 
the  history  of  the  preparation  of  the  deodorized  tincture  of  opium. 
He  said : 
u  The  interest  that  attaches  to  this  subject  is  quite  remarkable,  as 
it  has  been  the  title  of  a  paper  by  Dr.  Robert  Hare,  the  eminent 
chemical  philosopher,  who  was  for  many  years  professor  of  chem- 
istry in  the  University  of  Pennsylvania,  and  published  in  1828,  in 
the  preliminary  numbers  of  the  American  Journal  of  Pharmacy. 
Medical  men  have  long  felt  the  need  of  a  remedy  that  would  give 
the  relief  that  opium  affords  to  many  persons  without  producing 
the  nauseous  and  depressing  after-effects  so  often  noticed  by  those 
who  have  used  laudanum.  The  earliest  of  these,  so  far  as  I  have 
noticed  in  the  journals  written  in  the  English  language,  is  Battley's 
Sedative  Solution.  A  formula  which  is  said  to  yield  a  similar  prepara- 
tion is  published  in  the  eighth  volume,  American  Journal  of  Phar- 
macy, which  shows  it  to  be  an  aqueous  solution  of  opium  preserved 
by  some  spirituous  menstruum — no  other  care  being  taken  to  keep  it 
free  from  the  noxious  principles  of  opium  but  that  of  using  aqueous 
menstruum  only  to  exhaust  the  drug.  The  next  preparation  which 
attained  any  wide  notoriety  for  the  same  purpose  was  McMunn's 
Elixir  of  Opium,  the  formula  for  which  was  found  among  the  papers 
of  Dr.  James  R.  Chitton,  an  analytical  and  consulting  chemist  of 
New  York,  who  was  made  acquainted  with  the  formula  and  gave 
a  certificate  stating  it  was  free  from  the  objections  common  to  the 
ordinary  tincture  of  opium. 
"  Mr.  Duhamel,  a  pharmacist  of  this  city,  published  a  formula  for 
a  tincture  of  opium,  which  he  stated  his  preceptor,  Mr.  Elias  Durand, 
a  noted  French  apothecary,  then  located  at  southwest  corner  of 
Sixth  and  Chestnut  Streets,  used,  and  that  those  who  used  it  found 
it  free  from  the  disagreeable  effects  of  ordinary  laudanum. 
"  In  the  American  Journal  of  Pharmacy  for  i860  Dr.  Squibb 
communicated  the  results  of  his  experiments  on  opium  solution, 
giving  the  most  minute  details  of  his  process,  so  that  any  person 
