Today's car boot find...

[ffutures]

Was a copy of

The British Pharmacopia 1898 with Indian and Colonial Addendum 1900.

About 600 pages describing all of the drugs in use at the time, how they were prepared, etc. etc.

What it doesn't say is what they were used for, since the pharmacist is supposed to prepare them, not prescribe them, but there's tons of interesting stuff, such as the way salicylic acid (aspirin) was prepared  and how nasty it must have been in those days.

Ought to be pretty useful for Victorian/Edwardian RPGs etc. Unfortunately this is one of those books where it will be almost impossible to establish copyright status, with hundreds of contributors etc., so I don't think I can put it on line - and OCR would be a bastard due to the use of Latin etc. as well as English. Having said that, it may already be on line if someone has done the research, I haven't checked yet.

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any info let me know, I'll do my best to help.

Later - And before I started to look history_monk has found it on line!

 https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b24906293

And autopope has found an essential supplement covering more stuff, the extra pharmacopœia of Martindale and Westcott.


https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b31361985

Comments

[legionseagle]

I'd say you were pretty safe with 1898. Life plus 70 is the current cut off, so I don't think anyone old enough to have been prescribing stuff back in 1898 would have been likely to live beyond 1950 (and that leaves out the point that the work even predates the Copyright Act 1911.)

[ffutures]

The cautionary tale here is HG Wells, who wrote most of his most influential work in the 19th century but stayed in copyright until 2017 in the UK. Books published by huge committees, which this seems to be, add more problems - who wrote them, who edited them, when did editorial copyright end, etc. etc.

And to be honest I'm really not up to a 600-page OCR project at present, it took me several weeks to do the Police Code and that was only 244 much smaller pages - and that one turned out to have at least one editor whose copyright status was iffy! Bur fortunately the Welcome Library has actually done it - see the link from History_monk in the message below!

http://forgottenfutures.co.uk/policecode/code0.htm

[autopope]

Beware institutional copyright. I can't remember what organization promulgates the BP and BPC but it used to be the Royal Pharmaceutical Society who had a charter to compile them.

[history_monk]

The Welcome Library has done a PDF and made it available, but I'd never have thought to look for it without you. https://wellcomelibrary.org/item/b24906293

[ffutures]

Thanks - that's hopefully going to be useful!

[autopope]

In addition to the BP, you need the British Pharmaceutical Codex (essentially an appendix with all the recognized but less-often-used stuff in it), and Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia, which is a collection of monographs about all of these drugs and their effects (rather than the recipes).

Note that even in 1983, a copy of Martindale (then the 28th edition) sold new for about £200; today it's an online service accessed via monthly subscription and mostly by pharmacies and hospital drug information services. I have a 1960s-era 26th edition Martindale somewhere ...

Bingo! The Welcome Trust has it online; 20th edition is copyright-free.

[ffutures]

Thanks - at some point I will find a use for this stuff. Or not...

Hope your kafeklatch went well - I joined Reconvene but thought people who haven't met you should have priority, since they can't meet you in the bar.

[history_monk]

The "W. Wynn Westcott" who is listed as a co-author of the 20th Edition of Martindale appears to be the same person as William Wynn Westcott, co-founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Their birth and death dates are the same, and the Golden Dawn Westcott was a medical doctor and coroner.

Um...

[ffutures]

Okay... start checking for strange potions etc?

[ffutures]

Page 105: Extractum Cannabis Indicæ. (how to extract THC from marijuana.)