292  Alkaloids  of  Veratrum  Album.  {Am/Une?iSarno' 
method  of  preventing  deterioration  of  creasote  pills  on  exposure ; 
he  finds  that  of  the  several  methods  of  protecting  pills  none  is 
equal  to  putting  the  mass  into  capsules. — Pharm.  Centralhalle, 
1891,  203. 
THE  ALKALOIDS  OF  VERATRUM  ALBUM. 1 
By  G.  Salzberger. 
Prior  to  the  year  1879  very  little  was  known  concerning  the 
active  constituents  of  the  root  of  veratrum  album.  In  1 8 19  Pelle- 
tierand  Caventou  assumed  its  active  constituent  to  be  veratrine,  the 
alkaloid  of  cevadilla  seeds.  The  researches  of  Maisch  (1870)  and 
Dragendorff  (1872)  tended  to  show  that  this  assumption  had  no 
foundation  in  fact,  as  they  both  failed  to  find  this  principle. 
Simon,  in  1837,  isolated  a  base,  which  he  named  jervine,  and 
forty  years  later  Tobien  confirmed  his  work,  at  the  same  time 
stating  that  he  had  obtained  an  amorphous  base,  veratroidine. 
In  1879,  much  more  light  was  thrown  upon  the  matter  by  the 
paper  communicated  to  the  Chemical  Society  by  Wright  and  Luff. 
In  order  to  properly  appreciate  their  work,  and  to  compare  it  with 
the  results  of  Salzberger,  a  recapitulation  of  the  chief  facts  is  given. 
Wright  and  Luff  succeeded  in  obtaining  the  jervine  of  Simon, 
and  established  for  it  a  corrected  formula  (C26H37N03),  besides 
which  they  found  and  analyzed  two  other  crystalline  alkaloids, 
rubijervine  (C26H43N02)  and  pseudojervine  (C29H43N07),  together 
with  an  amorphous  one,  described  as  veratralbine.  A  small  quan- 
tity of  another  base  was  detected,  which,  with  veratralbine,  acted  as 
a  powerful  sternutatory.  This,  they  thought,  might  probably  be 
veratrine. 
Salzberger  began  his  investigations  in  1855,  tne  vlQW  °f  dis- 
covering the  active  constituent  of  the  drug.  Jervine  possessing 
only  slightly  toxic  properties,  and  rubijervine  and  pseudojervine 
being  absolutely  inactive,  it  was  reasonable  to  infer  that  the  poison- 
ous principle  still  remained  to  be  found.  In  the  course  of  his 
researches,  in  which  300  kilos  of  the  rhizome  have  been  used, 
he  has  obtained  the  three  crystalline  bises  described  by  Wright 
and  Luff,  and  two  other  crv>Tadine  alkaloids,  which  he  has  named 
protoveratrine  and  protov:ranidb:e. 
Abstract  from  Archiv  der  Pharmacie,  Band  228,  p.  462  ;  reprinted  from 
The  Medical  Chronicle,  April,  1891. 
