Johann Zwelfer

Johann Zwelfer or Zwellfer or Swölfer is a Médecin and German chemist , born in 1618 in the Palatinat and died in 1668.

After having worked during several years at a Apothecary, he studied medicine and was made receive doctor with the faculty of Padoue. He is established then with Vienna, where he practiced art to cure with enough success to deserve the confidence of the imperial family. Some authors give him the title of doctor of the Emperor; but it does not take it itself with the tète its works, and one can conclude from it that it had not been honoured with it. Its knowledge in the preparation of the remedies reflects it capable to announce the errors spread in the pharmaceutical Code of Augsburg ( Pharmacopœia augustana ), whose majority of the German doctors adopted the formulas blindly. But it was the wrong to seek to extend its reputation at the expense of its fellow-members, and to sow the features of ridiculous, indistinctly, on all the members of the college of Augsburg. The corrosive personalities and epigrams with which it had strewn its book ensured the flow of it and, in the space of a few years, it had five or six editions of various formats in Vienna, with London, Rotterdam, Nuremberg, of which some are increased parts directed against the doctors and the apothecaries who had misfortune to incur his disgrace.

As long as Zwelfer lived, no doctor of Augsburg dared to take the feather to answer him. He died in 1668, at the 50 years age, little regretted, even of those which he had spared in his writings. Five years after, Luc Schroeck tried to prove, in the Pharmacopœia augustana restituta (1673, in. fol.), that Zwelfer was only a Polypharmaque, and that its chemical knowledge which one had done such an amount of noise reduced to little thing (see Eloge of Schroeck by Jacques Brucker, in the Amœnitates litterar. of Schelhorn, T. 13, p. 24-27) (1); but Frederich Hoffmann, without claiming to excuse satirical mood of Zwelfer, took its defense under the report/ratio of the knowledge in the Clams pharmaceutica , etc; and later Stahl quoted it like one of the most skilful chemists of its time (see Fundanienta chimiœ ). There thus remains shown that Zwelfer was an educated man as pharmacist; but the advances in knowledge did not make less from there its works completely useless. Here are the titles:

  1. Animadversiones in pharrnacopœiam augustum ;
  2. Pharmacopeia Regia sive Dispensatorium Novum locupletatum and absolutum cum annexed Mantissa Spagyrica and gemino discuursu (1668);
  3. Discursus Apologeticus adversus Hippocratem chymicum Ottonis Tacîcenii ;
  4. Vindiciœ aâversus Fan, the ermj pharmacop. monspeliensern . These various writings were collected in volumes in-4, Dordrecht, 1672.

Zwelfer is regarded as one of the first to have tried to unify the Pharmacie.

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