The history of Duncan, Flockhart & Co. Commemorating the centenaries of ether and chloroform
Written and produced by the General Advertising Company of London Ltd. 1946. Scarce first edition. Hardcover with 51 pages and profusely illustrated.
A good copy in good clean condition throughout. No names or writing. William Flockhart, L.R.C.S.E. (1808 – 1871) was a Scottish chemist, a pharmacist who provided chloroform to Doctor (later Sir) James Young Simpson for his anaesthesia experiment at 52 Queen Street, Edinburgh on 4 November 1847. This was the first use of this chemical on humans when Simpson tried it on himself and a few friends, and then used it for pain relief in obstetrics, and surgery. This changed medical practice for over a century, according to the British Medical Journal.
Flockhart had joined John Duncan (also from Kinrosshire, who was 28 years his senior), as a partner in 1833, having started as an apprentice surgeon-apothecary[4] and qualifying as a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh in 1830, when he was 22 years old.[5] He did not practise as a surgeon, but with Duncan, worked closely with other doctors in Edinburgh on experimental drugs, which they then refined to improve in purity, following the medical experiments' results.[6] They were both among the nine founder members of the Northern British Branch of the Pharmaceutical Society (in 1841) and joined the Edinburgh Merchant Company. The second annual dinner of the Pharmaceutical Society included a toast 'to strangers present' by Flockhart, and three years later he was elected president. In his inaugural speech he highlighted the issues on unregulated production, of poisons for example, and the risks from a lack of quality controls, and thus he proposed a 'Universal Pharmacopoeia for Great Britain'.[5] In December 1861, Flockhart was also elected to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce.
