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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 369-371



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Book Review

Das Pulver als Arzneiform:
Ein Überblick über seine Entwicklung vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert


Adriane Jorek. Das Pulver als Arzneiform: Ein Überblick über seine Entwicklung vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Heidelberger Schriften zur Pharmazie- und Naturwissenschaftsgeschichte, no. 16. Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1998. 219 pp. Ill. DM 86.00 (paperbound, 3-8047-1567-2).

This overview of the manufacture and development of medicinal powders from the eighteenth to the twentieth century is a valuable addition to a utilitarian and information-driven approach to medical history. Appearing in the series Heidelberger Schriften zur Pharmazie- und Naturwissenschaftsgeschichte edited by Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahnke, it reflects one aspect of the tradition of German pharmaceutical historical research and the persistent requirement that dissertations be published and thus become part of the academic corpus. The fact that these honorable if slightly archaic traditions are in danger of yielding to budgetary strictures and high publishing costs makes each of these studies all the more valuable. Conforming to academic requirements, they offer to other researchers access to detailed information and a full bibliography not otherwise available in condensed form.

Adriane Jorek has successfully and succinctly mined the rich pharmaceutical literature of the eighteenth century and the trove of new journals and reviews that was beginning to flood the German pharmaceutical scene by the end of the [End Page 369] century. She provides the brief mandatory overview of powdered mixtures and their recipes from the Egyptian era to the Middle Ages, relying here as elsewhere on the considerable secondary literature by German historians of pharmacy. Although generally classified as a pulverized mixture of medicinal substances for internal or external use, the label pulvis was used for a large range of preparations containing fresh and dried plant materials, minerals, and inert substances, often closer to ointments than to dry powders. The profitable manufacture of powders for cosmetic and cleaning purposes also goes back to classical times; it saw a major rise in popularity in the eighteenth century, and remains profitable to this day in the form of medicated body powders and similar preparations that in Germany are still sold in both pharmacies and Drogerien.

The core of the book, and of major historical interest, is a detailed overview of the numbers, types, and evolution of recipes for powders in the pharmaceutical and other literature, in both Latin and the vernacular. Since the sixteenth century, individual cities—and later the German territories—had developed their own pharmacopoeias, leading to considerable differences among similarly named preparations by geographic region and over time, or depending on local or physician preferences. An additional source of variation was the use of simpler and less expensive, mainly native, materia medica for the mixtures in the pharmacopoeia pauperum, which were first produced for use in medical charity and by the end of the eighteenth century had become mandatory dispensatories for practice among the urban poor. They contained far fewer recipes with a much sparser range of ingredients, a frugality that may well have exposed their users to less risk from aggressive substances than the opulent multi-ingredient powders offered to the paying patient. A case in point is Dover's powder, which in E. C. Nolte's 1800 dispensatory for the poor in Hanover used sugar instead of tartarus vitriolatus, although opium and ipecacuanha remained as ingredients. According to C. W. Hufeland, writing in the 1820s, powders offered considerable economies of manufacture, packaging, and storage. These and similar idiosyncrasies persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century, when medicinal content, weights, and measures for all but the proprietary medications were standardized in the Pharmacopoeia Germaniae, first published in 1865.

Jorek also examines powders in a selection of the major teaching and reference manuals that supplemented the official pharmacopoeias. Reflecting the increasing independence of pharmaceutical learning and manufacture, these texts of instruction and reference were now being written by apothecaries as well as physicians, beginning with Der wohl unterwiesene Apotheker of 1730, whose author or...

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