Am.  Jour.  Pharru. 
June,  1899. 
Pharmacological  Notes. 
283 
.  PHARMACOLOGICAL  NOTES. 
>^THE  MYDRIATIC  ALKALOIDS.1 
By  A.  Pinner.2 
Perhaps  no  set  of  drugs  and  active  principles  has  been  subjected 
to  more  thoroughgoing  chemical  and  experimental  investigation 
than  those  having  a  mydriatic  influence  over  the  pupil.  As  a  result, 
many  obscure  points  as  to  their  composition  and  action  have  been 
cleared  up,  and  the  bewildering  multiplicity  of  names  for  all  the  dif- 
ferent solanaceous  alkaloids  has  been  reduced  to  a  few  of  rather 
more  definite  meaning.  Recently,  however,  some  of  the  older  alka- 
loids have  been  resurrected  and  their  virtues  extolled  under  new 
names  (hyoscin  under  the  new  name  of  scopolamin  for  instance), 
giving  rise  to  much  confusion  in  the  minds  of  those  who  cannot  be 
in  intimate  touch  with  the  latest  advance  in  the  organic  chemistry  of 
the  Solanacese.  Since  1833,  when  Phillip  Geiger  announced  that, 
along  with  Dr.  Hesse,  he  had  succeeded  in  obtaining  from  some  do- 
mestic poisonous  plants  the  alkaloids  atropine,  hyoscyamine  and  da- 
turine,  down  to  the  present  day  there  have  not  only  been  numerous 
additions  to  this  alkaloidal  family,  but  there  has  continued  a  more  or 
less  animated  discussion  as  to  the  properties  of  the  several  principles, 
and  the  identity  of  a  number  of  them.  Among  the  many  alkaloids, 
acids  and  bases  that  have  been  derived  from  the  mydriatic  plants 
may  be  mentioned  atropin,  tropin,  atropic  acid,  tropic  acid,  hyoscin, 
hyoscic  acid,  duboisin,  homatropin  (synthetic)  oxytropin,  scopola- 
min, scopolin,  oscin,  and  atroscin,and  chemists  and  pharmacologists 
are  so  far  from  agreement  as  to  the  properties  of  these  different 
principles  that  their  chemistry  is  by  no  means  complete  or  clear. 
One  stands  bewildered  at  the  multiplicity  and  interchangeability  of 
the  various  bases  and  salts,  and  yet  this  chaos  would  have  been  of 
little  concern  to  the  pharmaceutical  or  medical  world  had  not  hyo- 
scin hydrobromat  been  made  official  in  the  third  edition  of  the  Ger- 
man Pharmacopoeia,  and  then  been  changed  to  scopolamin  by  the 
influence  of  E.  Schmidt  in  the  1895  supplement  to  the  same. 
translated  by  Wendell  Reber,  Ph.G.,  M.D.,  Instructor  in  Diseases  of  the 
Eye  in  the  Philadelphia  Polyclinic  and  College  for  Graduates  in  Medicine, 
with  a  note  by  the  translator  on  the  pharmacologic  identity  of  hyoscin  and 
scopolamin. 
2  From  the  Centralblatt  fur praklische  Augenheilkunde ,  January,  1898. 
