Valentin Rose the Younger

Valentin Rose the Younger (born October 30, 1762 in Berlin ; † August 9, 1807 there ) was a German pharmacist and chemist .

Valentin Rose came from the Brandenburg merchant and scholar family Rose . He was the oldest child of Valentin Rose the Elder . The chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth also worked in his father's pharmacy Zum Weißen Schwan in Berlin (Spandauer Str. 77, a corner house at the confluence with Heidereutergasse, opposite today's Heiligegeistkirchplatz) . After Valentin Rose's father died, he managed the pharmacy and was the children's guardian. The pharmacy was also temporarily managed by Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädt .

Rose started apprenticeship as a pharmacist in Frankfurt am Main from 1778. In 1782 he was back in Berlin in his father's pharmacy and attended lectures at the Collegium medico-chirurgicum with the botanist Johann Gleditsch and with Klaproth. From 1783 to 1785 he wandered in Stettin and Königsberg. From 1785 to 1790 he was provisional and from 1791 owner of his father's pharmacy, which gained a high reputation under his management. In 1802 he had the pharmacy rebuilt by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . Since 1797 he was 2nd assessor at the Collegium Medicum and thus a colleague of Klaproth, who was 1st assessor, and with this he was responsible for the examination of pharmacists and supervision of pharmacies in Prussia. He also gave chemistry lectures at the Berlin Pharmaceutical Society, of which he was director from 1806. He improved the pharmacist training in Prussia and was one of the authors of the Pharmacopea Borussica (1799, 2nd edition 1804), the Prussian drug book, and the exemplary revised Prussian pharmacy regulations of 1801. He died of cholera .

His pharmacy was (not least because of the connection to Klaproth) a center of chemical and pharmaceutical research in Berlin and attracted aspiring pharmacists from all over Germany, according to company founders Emanuel Merck and Johann Daniel Riedel at the beginning of the 19th century. The later mineral water manufacturer Conrad Heinrich Soltmann also learned in the pharmacy.

In 1806 he developed a detection method for arsenic in corpses, before the later standard method of the Marsh test . The impetus was the murder trial against Sophie Charlotte Elisabeth Ursinus , in which he was involved as an assistant to the expert Klaproth, who made the need for reliable evidence clear.

In 1802 he developed a process for the decomposition of silicates in barium nitrate melt and in 1801 produced sodium hydrogen carbonate by introducing carbon dioxide into a soda solution. In 1807 he discovered inulin , which he isolated from the alanten root , and pyruvic acid by dry distillation of tartar . In Germany he was one of the early followers of the then new theory of oxidation by Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier .

He worked on the Handbook of Pharmacology and the Doctrine of Medicinal Products (two volumes, 1798 to 1800) by Friedrich Albert Carl Gren and, together with Adolph Ferdinand Gehlen, was the editor of the New Berlin Yearbook for Pharmacy , four volumes of which appeared from 1803 to 1806.

Rose was the guardian of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), who lost his father in 1787 and moved to Berlin with his mother and siblings in 1794. His eldest son Wilhelm Rose (1792–1867) later took over the pharmacy. Theodor Fontane completed an apprenticeship as a pharmacist with him from 1836 to 1840. Fontane describes this period in the first chapter of his autobiographical novel From Twenty to Thirty . His son Gustav Rose (1798–1873) became a well-known mineralogist, his son Heinrich Rose (1795–1864) a well-known chemist. After the death of Valentin Rose, Klaproth also took over the guardianship of these two sons.

literature

Holm-Dietmar Schwarz:  Rose, Valentin the Younger. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 43 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Martin Mende, Spandauer Strasse, History of Berlin . The house was completely destroyed in 1945.
2. ↑ Inngrun Possehl, Entrepreneur and Technical Progress at the Beginning of the Fine Chemicals Industry, in: Francesca Schinzinger (Ed.), Entrepreneur and Technical Progress, Harald Boltz / Oldenbourg 1996, p. 280