Seventeenth Century

Angelus Sala, born at Vicenza, went to Germany when young and passed his life there. He practised medicine first in Dresden, and later in Bavaria and Austria. Sala was interested in chemistry and an able experimenter. His works were published in 1647 by F. Beyer. He seems to have been a man of conservative judgment, free from vanity, which was rather the exception in chemical writers of his period. He criticized both Paracelsists and Galen-ists. Sala is credited with a number of notable observations 

Sala was also an important champion of the introduction of the chemical medicines. Sala s description of fermentation, as an intimate movement of elementary particles which tend to group themselves in a different order to make new compounds, is evidence of a concept doubtless derived from the atomic theory of the Greeks, and differs from the concept of chemical action in the nineteenth century mainly by lacking qualitative and quantitative definition. 

Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) of Breslau, a celebrated teacher of medicine at Wittenberg, was a follower of Paracelsus in the campaign for the chemical medicines, though independent in his judgment, so that he criticized Paracelsus and many of his followers in many things, especially for his belief in the existence of a universal medicine or 

Alkahest. He also blamed the Galenists for resisting the progress of medicine by their obstinate conservatism. Robert Boyle manifestly considered Sennert one of the chief exponents of the theory of the three principles and cites him in the Sceptical Chymist. 

As a student of medicine he was strongly influenced by the works of Paracelsus, not only by his progressive ideas, but also by his transcendental and mystical philosophy. Van Helmont resembled Paracelsus, however, too much in his disregard of traditional authority to be a blind follower of Paracelsus. While he accepted some of the latter s most characteristic ideas, as the Archaeus presiding over functions of digestion, etc., he rejected some of his more prominent theories as, for example, the three principles of matter. 

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M.M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century, Cambri< e University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1982. 

In temperate climates extracts from some plants were found to be excellent preservatives for hides and skins. The hides, with or without hair, were placed in pits in the ground, then covered with alternating layers of bark or leaves and skins. Water was added and later, ie, days or months depending on the thickness of the hide, the hides could be removed, washed, and oiled. The resulting leather is flexible and lasts essentially forever. This procedure was used well into the seventeenth century as the most common method of tanning. In some isolated primitive societies, the method is used in the 1990s. 

Defects in the LDL receptor have been particularly well explored as a basis of the disease familial hypercholesterolemia (93,111). A number of defects that collectively impair LDL receptor trafficking, binding, or deUvery underHe this disease where LDL and semm cholesterol rise to levels that mediate early cardiovascular mortaUty. Studies of the population distribution of this defect can determine the source of the original mutation. Thus, in Quebec, about 60% of the individuals suffering from familial hypercholesterolemia have a particular 10-kdobase deletion mutation in the LDL gene (112). This may have arisen from an original founder of the French Canadian settiement in the seventeenth century. 

Synthetic Iron Oxides. Iron oxide pigments have been prepared synthetically since the end of the seventeenth century. The first synthetic red iron oxide was obtained as a by-product of the production of sulfuric acid from iron sulfate containing slate. Later, iron oxide pigments were produced direcdy by the thermal decomposition of iron sulfates. In the 1990s, about 70% of all iron oxide pigments consumed are prepared synthetically. 

The study of flow and elasticity dates to antiquity. Practical rheology existed for centuries before Hooke and Newton proposed the basic laws of elastic response and simple viscous flow, respectively, in the seventeenth century. Further advances in understanding came in the mid-nineteenth century with models for viscous flow in round tubes. The introduction of the first practical rotational viscometer by Couette in 1890 (1,2) was another milestone. 

A large number of salts of sahcyhc acid have been prepared and evaluated for therapeutic or other commercial use. Table 7 hsts those most frequently referenced. Sodium sahcylate has analgesic, antiinflammatory, and antipyretic activities and was used extensively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a remedy, prepared from natural sources, for arthritis and rheumatism. In the 1990s the salt can be obtained directly from Kolbe-Schmitt carboxylation or by the reaction of sahcyhc acid with either aqueous sodium bicarbonate or sodium carbonate. The resulting mixture is heated until effervescence stops the salt is then isolated by filtration and evaporation to dryness at low temperatures. Generally, the solution must be kept slightly acidic so that a white product is obtained if the mixture is basic, a colored product results. The USP product contains 99.5—100.5% NaC H O (anhydrous). The May 1996 price was 8.15/kg (18). 

Tin [7440-31 -5] is one of the world s most ancient metals. When and where it was discovered is uncertain, but evidence points to tin being used in 3200—3500 BC. Ancient bron2e weapons and tools found in Ur contained 10—15 wt % tin. In 79 ad, Pliny described an alloy of tin and lead now commonly called solder (see Solders and brazing alloys). The Romans used tinned copper vessels, but tinned iron vessels did not appear until the fourteenth century in Bohemia. Tinned sheet for metal containers and tole (painted) ware made its appearance in England and Saxony about the middle of the seventeenth century. Although tinplate was not manufactured in the United States until the early nineteenth century, production increased rapidly and soon outstripped that in all other countries (1). 

The first report concerning barium compounds occurred in the early part of the seventeenth century when it was noted that the ignition of heavy spar gave a peculiar green light. A century later, Scheele reported that a precipitate formed when sulfuric acid was added to a solution of barium salts. The presence of natural barium carbonate, witherite [14941-39-0] BaCO, was noted in Scodand by Withering. 

Coffee was originally consumed as a food in ancient Abyssinia and was presumably first cultivated by the Arabians in about 575 AD (1). By the sixteenth century it had become a popular drink in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. The name coffee is derived from the Turkish pronunciation, kahveh, of the Arabian word gahweh signifying an infusion of the bean. Coffee was introduced as a beverage in Europe early in the seventeenth century and its use spread quickly. In 1725, the first coffee plant in the western hemisphere was planted on Martinique, West Indies. Its cultivation expanded rapidly and its consumption soon gained wide acceptance. 

Wolf, A., "A History of Sdency, Technology and Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." George Allen Unwin, London, 1935. 

R. Boyle showed that dilute sulfuric acid acting on iron gave a flammable gas several other seventeenth-century scientists made similar observations. 

Hydrogen sulfide is the only thermodynamically stable sulfane it occurs widely in nature as a result of volcanic or bacterial action and is, indeed, a prime source of elemental 8 (p. 647). It has been known since earliest times and its classical chemistry has been extensively studied since the seventeenth century.H28 is a foul smelling, very poisonous gas familiar to all students of chemistry. Its smell is noticeable at 0.02 ppm but the gas tends to anaesthetize the olefactory senses and the intensity of the smell is therefore a dangerously unreliable guide to its concentration. H28 causes irritation at 5 ppm, headaches and nausea at 10 ppm and immediate paralysis and death at 100 ppm it is therefore as toxic and as dangerous as HCN. 

The oldest effective drug for the treatment of this disease is indisputably quinine. Although the antipyretic activity of cinchona bark was known to the Incas, it remained for the Jesuit missionaries to uncover its antimalarial properties in the early seventeenth century. The advance of organic chemistry led to the isolation and identification of the alkaloid, quinine, as the active compound at the turn of this century. The emerging clinical importance of this drug led up to the establishment of cinchona plantations in the Dutch East Indies. This very circum-... 

In the mid-seventeenth century, when accurate atomic weights for a large number of elements were... 

Westfall, R. S. (1971). Force in Newton s Physics The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century . London Macdonald. 

A device commonly used to measure atmospheric pressure is the mercury barometer (Figure 5.1), first constructed by Evangelista Torricelli in the seventeenth century. This consists of a closed gas tube filled with mercury inverted over a pool of mercury. The pressure exerted by the mercury column exactly equals that of the atmosphere. Hence the height of the column is a measure of the atmospheric pressure. At or near sea level, it typically varies from 740 to 760 mm, depending on weather conditions. 

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