Where is victorian pharmacy set

You might expect the possibilities of a pharmacy to be less than that of a farm, but it was quite the reverse — from medicine and cosmetics to photography and dentistry, the pharmacy functions well as a gateway to exploring almost every social and cultural issue imaginable, and Ruth Goodman is still the most committed and enthusiastic host on TV. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. I then ran a further day of parallel testing at the museum with the general public. After these two sessions, we had analysed around a quarter of the jars. Most of the inorganic salts appeared to match their labels, but a few didn't. The quicklime did not give the anticipated orange-red flame test. Instead we were left with a brown sticky mass and a strong smell of toffee - the original calcium oxide had been replaced with icing sugar.

Silver nitrate is a soluble silver compound. When a solution of silver nitrate is added to a halide salt, containing either chloride, bromide or iodide ions, characteristically coloured insoluble silver halide salts precipitate. Silver chloride is white, silver bromide is cream and silver iodide is pale yellow.

When a solution containing barium ions is added to a solution containing sulfate ions, a thick white solid forms: barium sulfate.

Mercury, like many transition metals, has several common forms. It is also bonded to a ligand, ammonia. This can be identified by adding acid to release the ammonia and then adding iodide.

An orange-red solid iis produced when mercury ii iodide forms:. The oxygen in phenol can donate its lone pair of electrons to iron III and act as a ligand. This shift in energy levels in the iron gives a purple colour. As well as being cheap and accessible, the tests were quick and, if well selected, surprisingly informative. The mercuric compound was confirmed as authentic by the bright red precipitate of mercury ii iodide which formed slowly when potassium iodide was added.

We grew increasingly creative and strategic in our hunt for suitable protocols to identify our mystery substances. The organic substances, of which the majority were botanic extracts, had to be brought back to the university labs to be analysed using infrared and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy equipment.

We anticipated that we would need to continue to combine wet tests with instrumental techniques. We scheduled a week and invited anyone who was interested to attend. The project attracted chemistry undergraduates, along with groups of sixth formers from five schools. This provided a work force sufficient to complete the task. However, by their nature, extracts can contain cocktails of complicated substances. This made it a much more daunting task than the inorganic substances had been.

In some cases, such as rose water, we were able to borrow in this case from Katherine's kitchen cupboard , a reference sample. In other cases, more research was required to identify a suitable test or combination of tests. Powders with all the physical properties of talcum powder proved frustratingly resistant to all standard wet tests, but gave enough of an IR peak where silicate should absorb to convince us.

The most difficult substances were 'dragon's blood' and a brown powder in an unlabelled jar, which smelled of carob. These finally gave a positive, and very beautiful purple, result for poly phenols with ferric chloride solution.

Three substances defeated our combined problem-solving capacity, but they had the characteristic colour of herbal extracts and the liquid burned with a clear blue flame. An iodoform triiodomethane test confirmed that the solvent was ethanol, so we felt it reasonable that the original extract was still in the bottle. After all, it would make no sense to dispose of one ethanolic solution on grounds of safety and replace it with another.

In just one case, we had to resort to nuclear magnetic resonance NMR spectroscopy, which used up all the deuterated water our limited budget would run to. While recognising the limitation of drawing conclusions from the several part-collections that have been merged, several points of interest emerge from the analysis.

First and foremost is the large proportion of unlabelled and empty bottles in the display. Approximately half of the contents of the labelled bottles have been disposed of by successive curators, with the inorganics being treated slightly more leniently and also constituting a useful source of inert 'bottle-fillers'.

Nevertheless, the predominance of organic remedies, almost all plant extracts, in the original containers means that they still outnumber any other category, even after significant reduction by disposal. Mineral remedies were nearly all petrochemical in nature and may well have been disposed of due to their flammability in some cases and, more recently, fears about the carcinogenicity of some.

In both, you take the part of the pharmacist: first, as you spill and then clean up a poison. As part of the interactive exhibits, visitors are also invited to become registered with as it was then known The Pharmaceutical Society. Visitors should also make some time to explore the other medicine galleries.