Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

mercury. The rest of the pill was made up of 27 percent clay, 16
percent water, 34 percent ‘soluble saccharine matters,’ 12 percent
‘insoluble organic matter,’ and trace percentages of colouring and
sand.
2. Sulphate of quinine, derived from Peruvian bark, was adulterated
by being combined with chalk, plaster of Paris, and the salts of
willow bark.
3. Imports of scammony, (The active principle is the glucoside
scammionin or jalapin), C 34 H 11 O 6 . Scammony is inert until it has
passed into the duodenum where it is converted into a powerful
purgative). ‘It contained generally only about one-half the active
principle of the genuine article.’ The rest was ‘a worthless vegetable
extract commingled with clay’. It was also an anthelmintic.
The Act did not apply to US produced adulterated drugs, so it was
only a partial success. A Spurious Solution to a Genuine
Problem (Walch, 2002). This bill did not prevent the rapid growth of
the patent medicines industry.
Dr Sibson pointed out that in four cases chloroform caused death
by paralysis of the heart; In all the four cases it is manifest that the
immediate cause of the instantaneous death lay in the heart (London
Medical Gazette vol xiii, 1848 p 100).
‘Zhi Wu Shi Tu Kao’ [Atlas of medicinal plants] by Wu Qi-Jun.
1851 The Arsenic Act. The retail sale of arsenic was restricted and the
purchaser had to be known to the seller and records had to be kept.
Up to this time more than a third of poisonings were due to arsenic
(Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB), Theme E,
sheet 1).
1853 Karl Friedrich Gerhardt (1816-56), professor of chemistry at
Montpellier University, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid.
1854 Invention of the hypodermic syringe by Doctor Alexander Wood of
Edinburgh (Wood, 1855).
1855 Cesare Bertagnini in 1855 published a detailed description of the
classic adverse events associated with a salicylic acid overdose,
which he studied by deliberately ingesting excessive doses, about 6
grammes in two days. The first day there were no problems, but on
the second day there was a continuous noise in the ears and a kind
of dizziness. He said that his superior, Professor Piria, had taken
salicin but the effect of a large dose was so disconcerting that he did
not do any more research (Bertagnini, 1855).