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CHAPTER VI.
CHEMISTRY, MEDICINES, SURGERY, DENTISTRY

Chemistry, having for its field the properties and changes of matter, has excited more or less attention ever since men had the power to observe, to think, and to experiment.

Some knowledge of chemistry must have existed among the ancients to have enabled the Egyptians to smelt ores and work metals, to dye their cloths, to make glass, and to preserve their dead from decomposition; so, too, to this extent among the Phœnicians, the Israelites, the Greeks and the Romans; and perhaps to a greater extent among the Chinese, who added powder to the above named and other chemical products. Aristotle speculated, and the alchemists of the middle ages busied themselves in magic and guess-work. It reached the dignity of a science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the labours of such men, in the former century, as Libavius, Van Helmont, Glauber, Tachenius, Boyle, Lémery and Becher; Stahl, Boerhaave and Hamberg in both; and of Black, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Priestley and others in the eighteenth.

But so great have been the discoveries and inventions in this science during the nineteenth century that any chemist of any previous age, if permitted to look forward upon them, would have felt

 
"Like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."
 

Indeed, the chemistry of this century is a new world, of which all the previous discoveries in that line were but floating nebulæ.

So vast and astonishingly fast has been the growth and development of this science that before the century was two-thirds through its course Watts published his Dictionary of Chemistry in five volumes, averaging a thousand closely printed pages, followed soon by a thousand-page supplement; and it would have required such a volume every year since to adequately report the progress of the science. Nomenclatures, formulas, apparatuses and processes have all changed. It was deemed necessary to publish works on The New Chemistry, and Professor J. P. Cooke is the author of an admirable volume under that title.

We can, therefore, in this chapter only step from one to another of some of the peaks that rise above the vast surrounding country, and note some of the lesser objects as they appear in the vales below.

The leading discoveries of the century which have done so much to aid Chemistry in its giant strides are the atomic and molecular theories, the mechanics of light, heat, and electricity, the correlation and conservation of forces, their invariable quantity, and their indestructibility, spectrum analysis and the laws of chemical changes.

John Dalton, that humble child of English north-country Quaker stock, self-taught and a teacher all his life, in 1803 gave to the world his atomic theory of chemistry, whereby the existence of matter in ultimate atoms was removed from the region of the speculation of certain ancient philosophers, and established on a sure foundation.

The question asked and answered by Dalton was, what is the relative weight of the atoms composing the elementary bodies?

He discovered that one chemical element or compound can combine with another chemical element, to form a new compound, in two different proportions by weight, which stand to each other in the simple ratio of one to two; and at the same time he published a table of the Relative weight of the ultimate particles of Gaseous and other Bodies. Although the details of this table have since been changed, the principles of his discovery remain unchanged. Says Professor Roscoe:

"Chemistry could hardly be said to exist as a science before the establishment of the laws of combination in multiple proportions, and the subsequent progress of chemical science materially depended upon the determination of these combined proportions or atomic weights of the elements first set up by Dalton. So that among the founders of our science, next to the name of the great French Philosopher, Lavoisier, will stand in future ages the name of John Dalton, of Manchester."

Less conspicuous but still eminently useful were his discoveries and labours in other directions, in the expansion of gases, evaporation, steam, etc.

Wollaston and Gay-Lussac, both great chemists, applied Dalton's discovery to wide and most important fields in the chemical arts.

Also contemporaneous with Dalton was the great German chemist, Berzelius, who confirmed and extended the discoveries of Dalton. More than this, it has been said of Berzelius:

"In him were united all the different impulses which have advanced the science since the beginning of the present epoch. The fruit of his labors is scattered throughout the entire domain of the science. Hardly a substance exists to the knowledge of which he has not in some way contributed. A direct descendant of the school of his countryman, Bergman, he was especially renowned as an analyst. No chemist has determined by direct experiment the composition of a greater number of substances. No one has exerted a greater influence in extending the field of analytical chemistry."

As to light, the great Huygens, the astronomer and mathematician, the improver of differential calculus and of telescopes, the inventor of the pendulum clock, chronometers, and the balance wheel to the watch, and discoverer of the laws of the double refraction of light and of polarisation, had in the 17th century clearly advanced the idea that light was propagated from luminous bodies, not as a stream of particles through the air but in waves or vibrations of ether, which is a universal medium extending through all space and into all bodies. This fundamental principle now enters into the explanation of all the phenomena of light.

Newton in the next century, with the prism, decomposed light, and in a darkened chamber reproduced all the colours and tints of the rainbow. But there were dark lines in that beam of broken sunlight which Newton did not notice.

It was left to Joseph von Fraunhofer, a German optician, and to the 19th century, and nearly one hundred years after Newton's experiments with the prism, to discover, with finer prisms that he had made, some 590 of these black lines crossing the solar spectrum. What they were he did not know, but conjectured that they were caused by something which existed in the sun and stars and not in our air. But from that time they were called Fraunhofer's dark lines.

From the vantage ground of these developments we are now enabled to step to that mountain peak of discovery from which the sun and stars were looked into, their elements portrayed, their very motions determined, and their brotherhood with the earth, in substance, ascertained.

The great discovery of the cause of Fraunhofer's dark bands in the broken sunlight was made by Gustave Robert Kirchoff, a German physician, in his laboratory in Heidelberg, in 1860, in conjunction with his fellow worker, Robert Bunsen.

Kirchoff happened to let a solar ray pass through a flame coloured with sodium, and through a prism, so that the spectrum of the sun and the flame fell one upon another. It was expected that the well known yellow line of sodium would come out in the solar spectrum, but it was just the opposite that took place. Where the bright yellow line should have fallen appeared a dark line.

With this observation was coupled the reflection that heat passes from a body of a higher temperature to one of a lower, and not inversely. Experiments followed: iron, sodium, copper, etc., were heated to incandescence and their colours prismatically separated. These were transversed with the same colours of other heated bodies, and the latter were absorbed and rendered black. Kirchoff then announced his law that all bodies absorb chiefly those colours which they themselves emit. Therefore these vapours of the sun which were rendered in black lines were so produced by crossing terrestrial vapors of the same nature.

Thus by the prism and the blowpipe were the same substances found in the sun, the stars, and the earth. The elements of every substance submitted to the process were analysed, and many secrets in the universe of matter were revealed.

Young, of America, invented a splendid combination of spectroscope and telescope, and Huggins of England was the first to establish by spectrum analysis the approach and retreat of the stars.

It was prior to this time that those wonderful discoveries and labours were made which developed the true nature of heat, which demonstrated the kinship and correlation of the forces of Nature, their conservation, or property of being converted one into another, and the indestructibility of matter, of which force is but another name.

The first demonstrations as to the nature of heat were given by the American Count Rumford, and then by Sir Humphry Davy, just at the close of the 18th century, and then followed in this the brilliant labours and discoveries of Mayer and Helmholtz of Germany, Colding of Denmark, and Joule, Grove, Faraday, Sir William Thomson of England, of Henry, Le Conte and Martin of America, as to the correlation and convertibility of all the forces.

The French revolution, and the Napoleonic wars, isolating France and exhausting its resources, its chemists were appealed to devote their genius and researches to practical things; to the munitions of war, the rejuvenation of the soil, the growing of new crops, like the sugar beet, and new manufacturing products.

Lavoisier had laid deep and broad in France the foundations of chemistry, and given the science nomenclature that lasted a century. So that the succeeding great teachers, Berthollet, Guyton, Fourcroy and their associates, and the institutions of instruction in the sciences fostered by them, and inspired in that direction by Napoleon, bent their energies in material directions, and a tremendous impulse was thus given to the practical application of chemistry to the arts and manufactures of the century.

The same spirit, to a less extent, however, manifested itself in England, and as early as 1802 we find Sir Humphry Davy beginning his celebrated lectures on the Elements of Agricultural Chemistry before a board of agriculture, a work that has passed through many editions in almost every modern language.

When the fact is recalled that agricultural chemistry embraces the entire natural science of vegetable and animal production, and includes, besides, much of physics, meteorology and geology, the extent and importance of the subject may be appreciated; and yet such appreciation was not manifested in a practical manner until the 19th century. It was only toward the end of the 18th century that the vague and ancient notions that air, water, oil and salt formed the nutrition of plants, began to be modified. Davy recognized and explained the beneficial fertilizing effects of ammonia, and analysed and explained numerous fertilizers, including guano. It is due to his discoveries and publications, combined with those of the eminent men on the continent, above referred to, that agricultural chemistry arose to the dignity of a science. The most brilliant, eloquent and devoted apostle of that science who followed Davy was Justus von Liebig of Germany, who was born in Darmstadt in 1803, the year after Davy commenced his lectures in England. It was in response to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that he gave to the world his great publications on Chemistry in its application to Agriculture, Commerce, Physiology, and Pathology, from which great practical good resulted the world over. One of his favorite subjects was that of fermentation, and this calls up the exceedingly interesting discoveries in the nature of alcohol, yeast, mould – aging malt, wines and beer – and their accompanying beneficial results.

In one of Huxley's charming lectures – such as he delighted to give before a popular audience – delivered in 1871, at Manchester, on the subject of "Yeast," he tells how any liquid containing sugar, such as a mixture of honey and water, if left to itself undergoes the peculiar change we know as fermentation, and in the process the scum, or thicker muddy part that forms on top, becomes yeast, carbonic acid gas escapes in bubbles from the liquid, and the liquid itself becomes spirits of wine or alcohol. "Alcohol" was a term used until the 17th century to designate a very fine subtle powder, and then became the name of the subtle spirit arising from fermentation. It was Leeuwenhoek of Holland who, two hundred years ago, by the use of a fine microscope he invented, first discovered that the muddy scum was a substance made up of an enormous multitude of very minute grains floating separately, and in lumps and in heaps, in the liquid. Then, in the next century the Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, discovered that these bodies grew to a certain size and then budded, and from the buds the plant multiplied; and thus that this yeast was a mass of living plants, which received in science the name of "torula," that the yeast plant was a kind of fungus or mould, growing and multiplying. Then came Fabroni, the French chemist, at the end of the 18th century, who discovered that the yeast plant was of bag-like form, or a cell of woody matter, and that the cell contained a substance composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. This was a vegeto-animal substance, having peculiarities of "animal products."

Then came the great chemists of the 19th century, with their delicate methods of analysis, and decided that this plant in its chief part was identical with that element which forms the chief part of our own blood. That it was protein, a substance which forms the foundation of every animal organism. All agreed that it was the yeast plant that fermented or broke up the sugar element, and produced the alcohol. Helmholtz demonstrated that it was the minute particles of the solid part of the plant that produced the fermentation, and that such particles must be growing or alive, to produce it. From whence sprang this wonderful plant – part vegetable, part animal? By a long series of experiments it was found that if substances which could be fermented were kept entirely closed to the outer air, no plant would form and no fermentation take place. It was concluded then, and so ascertained, that the torulae in the plant proceeded from the torulae in the atmosphere, from "gay motes that people the sunbeams." Concerning just how the torulae broke up or fermented the sugar, great chemists have differed.

After the discovery that the yeast was a plant having cells formed of the pure matter of wood, and containing a semi-fluid mass identical with the composition which constitutes the flesh of animals, came the further discovery that all plants, high and low, are made up of the same kind of cells, and their contents. Then this remarkable result came out, that however much a plant may otherwise differ from an animal, yet, in essential constituents the cellular constructure of animal and plant is the same. To this substance of energy and life, common in the minute plant cell and the animal cell, the German botanist, Hugo von Mohl, about fifty years ago gave the name "protoplasm." Then came this astounding conclusion, that this protoplasm being common to both plant and animal life, the essential difference consisted only in the manner in which the cells are built up and are modified in the building.

And from that part of these great discoveries which revealed the fact that the sugary element was infected, as it were, from the germs of the air, producing fermentation and its results, arose that remarkable theory of many diseases known as the "germ theory." And, as it was found in the yeast plant that only the solid part or particle of the plant germinated fermentation and reaction, so, too, it has been found by the germ theory that only the solid particle of the contagious matter can germinate or grow the disease.

In this unfolding of the wonders of chemistry in the nineteenth century, the old empirical walls between forces and organisms, and organic and inorganic chemistry, are breaking down, and celestial and terrestrial bodies and vapours, living beings, and growing plants are discovered to be the evolution of one all-pervading essence and force. One is reminded of the lines of Tennyson:

 
"Large elements in order brought
And tracts of calm from tempest made,
And world fluctuation swayed
In vassal tides that followed thought.
 
 
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."
 

In the class of alcohol and in the field of yeast, the work of Pasteur, begun in France, has been followed by improvements in methods for selecting proper ferments and excluding improper ones, and in improved processes for aging and preserving alcoholic liquors by destroying deleterious ferments. Takamine, in using as ferment, koji, motu and moyashi, different forms of mould, and proposing to do entirely away with malt in the manufacture of beer and whiskey, has made a noteworthy departure. Manufacturing of malt by the pneumatic process, and stirring malt during germination, are among the improvements.

Carbonating.– The injecting of carbonic acid gas into various waters to render them wholesome, and also into beers and wines during fermentation, and to save delay and prevent impurities, are decided improvements.

The immense improvements and discoveries in the character of soils and fertilisers have already been alluded to. Hundreds of instruments have been invented for measuring, analysing, weighing, separating, volatilising and otherwise applying chemical processes to practical purposes.

To the chemistry of the century the world is indebted for those devices and processes for the utilisation and manufacture of many useful products from the liquids and oils, sugar from cane and beets, revivifying bone-black, centrifugal machinery for refining sugar, in defecating it by chemicals and heat, in evaporating it in pans, in separating starch and converting it into glucose, etc.

Oils and Fats.– Up to within this century the vast amount of cotton seed produced with that crop was a waste. Then by the process, first of steaming the seed and expressing the oil, now by the process of extraction by the aid of volatile solvents, and casting off the solvents by distillation, an immensely valuable product has been obtained.

The utilising of oils in the manufacture of oilcloth and linoleum and rubber, has become of great commercial value. Formerly sulphur was the vulcanising agent, now chloride of sulphur has been substituted for pure sulphur.

Steam and the distillation processes have been applied with great success to the making of glycerine from fat and from soap underlye and in extracting fat from various waste products.

Bleaching and Dyeing.– Of course these arts are very old, but the old methods would not be recognised in the modern processes; and those who lived before the century knew nothing of the magnificent colours, and certain essences, and sweet savours that can be obtained from the black, hand-soiling pieces of coal. In the making of illuminating gas, itself a finished chemical product of the century, a vast amount of once wasted products, especially coal tar, are now extensively used; and from coal tar and the residuum of petroleum oils, now come those splendid aniline dyes which have produced such a revolution in the world of colours. The saturation of sand by a dye and its application to fabrics by an air blast; the circulation of the fluid colors, or of fluids for bleaching or drying, or oxidising, through perforated cylinders or cops on which the cloths are wound; devices for the running of skeins through dyes, the great improvements in carbon dyes and kindred colours, the processes of making the colours on the fibre, and the perfumes made by the synthetic processes, are among the inventions in this field.

The space that a list of the new chemical products of this age and their description would fill, has already been indicated by reference to the great dictionary of Watts. Some of the electro-chemical products will be hereinafter referred to in the Chapter on Electricity, and the chemistry of Metallurgy will be treated under the latter topic.

Electro-chemical Methods.– Space will only permit it to be said that these methods are now employed in the production of a large number of elements, by means of which very many of them which were before mere laboratory specimens, have now become cheap and useful servants of mankind in a hundred different ways; such as aluminium, that light and non-corrosive metal, reduced from many dollars an ounce a generation ago, to 30 and 40 cents a pound now; carborundum, largely superseding emery and diamond dust as an abradant; artificial diamonds; calcium carbide, from which the new illuminating acetylene gas is made; disinfectants of many kinds; pigments, chromium, manganese, and chlorates by the thousand tons. The most useful new chemical processes are those used in purifying water sewage and milk, in electroplating metals and other substances, in the application of chemicals to the fine arts, in extracting grease from wool, and the making of many useful products from the waste materials of the dumps and garbage banks.

Medicines and Surgery.– One hundred years ago, the practice of medicine was, in the main, empirical. Certain effects were known to usually follow the giving of certain drugs, or the application of certain measures, but why or how these effects were produced, was unknown. The great steps forward have been made upon the true scientific foundation established by the discoveries and inventions in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. The discovery of anaesthetics and their application in surgery and the practice of medicine, no doubt constitutes the leading invention of the century in this field.

Sir Humphry Davy suggested it in 1800, and Dr. W. T. Morton was the first to apply an anaesthetic to relieve pain in a surgical operation, which he did in a hospital in Boston in 1846. Both its original suggestion and application were also claimed by others.

Not only relief from intense pain to the patient during the operation, but immense advantages are gained by the long and careful examination afforded of injured or diseased parts, otherwise difficult or impossible in a conscious patient.

The exquisite pain and suffering endured previous to the use of anaesthetics often caused death by exhaustion. Many delicate operations can now be performed for the relief of long-continued diseases which before would have been hazardous or impossible. How many before suffered unto death long-drawn-out pain and disease rather than submit to the torture of the knife! How many lives have been saved, and how far advanced has become the knowledge of the human body and its painful diseases, by this beneficent remedy!

Inventions in the field of medicine consist chiefly in those innumerable compositions and compounds which have resulted from chemical discoveries. Gelatine capsules used to conceal unpalatable remedies may be mentioned as a most acceptable modern invention in this class. Inventions and discoveries in the field of surgery relate not only to instrumentalities but processes. The antiseptic treatment of wounds, by which the long and exhausting suppuration is avoided, is among the most notable of the latter. In instruments vast improvements have been made; special forms adapted for operation in every form of injury; in syringes, especially hypodermic, those used for subcutaneous injections of liquid remedies; inhalers for applying medicated vapours and devices for applying volatile anaesthetics, and devices for atomising and spraying liquids. In the United States alone about four thousand patents have been granted for inventions in surgical instruments.

Dentistry.– This art has been revolutionised during the century. Even in the time of Herodotus, one special set of physicians had the treatment of teeth; and artificial teeth have been known and used for many ages, but all seems crude and barbarous until these later days. In addition to the use of anaesthetics, improvements have been made in nearly every form of dental instruments, such as forceps, dental engines, pluggers, drills, hammers, etc., and in the means and materials for making teeth. Later leading inventions have reference to utilising the roots of destroyed teeth as supports on which to form bridges to which artificial teeth are secured, and to crowns for decayed teeth that still have a solid base.

There exists no longer the dread of the dentist's chair unless the patient has neglected too long the visit. Pain cannot be all avoided, but it is ameliorated; and the new results in workmanship in the saving and in the making of teeth are vast improvements over the former methods.