The chemical work of Alexander and Jane Marcet

Alexander Marcet was an authority on urinary calculi and their analysis whe n few medical practitioners appreciated the usefulness of chemistry in the explanation and treatment of disease. In An Essay on The Chemical History a nd Medical Treatment of Calculous Disorders, he described the discovery of an xanthine stone. He drew line illustrations of simple chemical apparatus useful for bedside analysis. His microtechnique used drops bf solution and pinhead pieces of calculi; reagents were acids and alkalies and the blowpip e in conjunction with a small alcohol lamp. He reported the earliest descri ption of a disorder later named "alcaptonuria". Marcet's work and that of a few others, on the chemical composition:of urine and calculi, laid the fou ndations of our present knowledge. Between 1807 and 1820, his lectures:to t he medical students at Guy's Hospital were illustrated by experiments. Jane Haldimand Marcet wrote the very popular Conversations on Chemistry (16 editions in Great Britain). Her book dominated elementary chemical instruc tion during the first half of the 19th century. She followed Lavoisier's sc heme of classification and explained chemical reactions in terms of affinit y, aggregation, gravitation, and repulsion. Her advocacy that experimentati on accompany lecture was new. The availability of serious scientific educat ion in the new women's academies: set the stage for increasing women's invo lvement in science. She also published a series of Conversations. The topic s were Political Economy, Natural Philosophy, and Vegetable Physiology. (C) 2001 American Association for Clinical Chemistry.