Jacques-François Demachy

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Recueil de Dissertations Physico-Chimiques

Jacques-François Demachy , also Jacques-François de Machy , (born August 30, 1728 in Paris , † July 7, 1803 ibid) was a French chemist and pharmacist.

Life

Demachy was the son of a businessman, attended the Collège de Beauvais in Paris and attended the lectures of the chemist Guillaume-François Rouelle in the Jardin du Roi before completing an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. In 1761 he was licensed as a pharmacist and had his own pharmacy in Paris. In addition, he gave lectures on natural history, botany and chemistry until he had to stop this in 1768 under pressure from the medical faculty of the Sorbonne. But he was a professor of natural history at the Collège de Pharmacie, founded in 1777 by the Paris Pharmacists' Association. This made him the first professor of materia medica at what would later become the Faculty of Pharmacy in Paris. In the 1770s he was the royal censor for literature in the fields of pharmacy and chemistry. In the 1780s he held key positions in French pharmacy. From 1781 to 1783 he was Provost des Collège de Pharmacie, from 1797 to 1799 he was one of the editors of the Journal de la Société libre des pharmaciens de Paris and in 1788 his important handbook of pharmacy appeared. His business, however, suffered from his teaching and writing activities. In 1791 he sold his pharmacy when the pharmacy sector in Paris was temporarily liberalized and the pharmacist companies suppressed during the revolution. In 1783 he became an army pharmacist for the camps near Paris and soon afterwards at the military hospital of St. Denis. In 1795 he took over the management of the apothicairerie générale and then the central pharmacy of the hospitals, Pharmacie centrale des hospices .

He published some books that give an overview of the knowledge of his time and the chemical methods used in laboratory and industry (especially his L'art du distillateur d'eaux-fortes of 1773 for the chemical industry of that time ). Demachy was still a representative of the phlogiston theory of Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl and translated chemical works by their German followers ( Andreas Sigismund Marggraf , Johann Juncker and Johann Heinrich Pott ) into French. Towards the end of the century he therefore came into conflict with the supporters of the new chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier , whom he called pneumatists .

He is best known for his textbooks and less for his discoveries in chemistry. In 1766 he became a member of the Leopoldina . In 1770 he discovered the crystal hydrate of tin (IV) chloride .

He also left handwritten works of poetry, which, with the exception of Histoires et contes (1907), were not printed. They are based on the fables of La Fontaine, but also on Guy Du Faur de Pibrac and the satirist Juvenal .

Fonts

  • Institut de Chymie 1766
  • Procèdes chimiques rangés methodiquement et définies, 1769
  • L´art du distillateur des eaux fortes, 1773
  • L´art du distilleur liquoristes, 1775
  • Recueil de dissertations physico-chimiques, 1774
  • Laboratory assistant on a large scale or the art of manufacturing chemical products in a factory, Leipzig: Crusius 1784
  • The liquer manufacturer 1785
  • Manuel du Pharmacien 1788

literature

  • Paul Dorveux: Demachy et Bouriat , Bulletin de la Société d'histoire de la Pharmacie, Volume 14, 1926, pp. 177-179, online
  • Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 112f

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member entry of Jacques François Demachy at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on January 26, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Demachy, Jacques-François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES de Machy, Jacques-François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist and pharmacist
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1728
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1803
Place of death Paris