William Brooke O'Shaughnessy

William Brooke O'Shaughnessy

Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (born October 1809 in Limerick , Ireland , † January 8, 1889 in Southsea near Portsmouth ) was an Irish chemist and medicin as well as inventor in telegraphy , which he helped to break through in India. He pioneered the use of intravenous saline and marijuana in medicine.

Apprenticeship and first years in the UK

O'Shaughnessy studied medicine from 1827 at the University of Edinburgh with a doctorate in 1829 and then practiced as a doctor in Edinburgh, where he also gave lectures on toxicology and forensic medicine. In 1830 he went to London, but could not get a license as a doctor there and gave private lessons in forensic medicine there. While analyzing the blood of cholera patients, he invented infusion therapy with saline solution, which was first used in medicine by Thomas Latta (1796–1833) in 1832 (also during a cholera epidemic), but was long forgotten. In Edinburgh and London he also developed new analytical methods (detection methods for nitrite, iodine, potassium iodide, thiocyanates, lead chromate, mercury compounds, copper in food, opium analysis).

Career in India

In 1833 he went to Calcutta as an army surgeon on behalf of the East India Company and became professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the Medical College in Calcutta, which he helped to found. There he wrote an English-language chemistry textbook for his Indian students. He had contact with local Indian Ayurveda doctors and Islamic doctors and examined the ingredients of Indian natural medicine (including opium). He put this down in pharmacy books (Bengal Pharmacopoeia 1844). As a member of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, he published one of the first papers on the medical use of cannabis (known in India as a folk remedy) in 1839 . O'Shaughnessy used it, among other things, to alleviate convulsions in tetanus and rabies and in rheumatism and promoted its use in England. He was successful at that time, even Queen Victoria's personal physician J. Russell Reynolds recommended its use for menstrual pain. Numerous articles subsequently appeared on the medicinal uses of marijuana.

In 1841 he went back to England, but returned to India in 1844, where he worked as an analyst for the mint. In 1846 he built a plant for the production of gun cotton after having independently analyzed the composition. In India he had already started experiments on telegraphy in 1838 and built the first telegraphic underwater connection under the Hugli in Calcutta. O'Shaughnessy had long unsuccessfully advocated the nationwide introduction of telegraphy in India until he finally found support from Governor General Dalhousie , who made him director general of Indian telegraphy. From 1853 to 1855 he oversaw the installation of 3,500 miles of telegraph lines in India, which became essential to British domination of the subcontinent. Copper lines, as in England and the USA, proved to be too fragile and instead he resorted to iron lines, which he laid on bamboo poles and underground in cement (they were also better protected from storms and insurgents this way). He also made further technical improvements in telegraphy and for the galvanic elements used for this (use of a silver chloride electrode, use of tanned sheepskins for Daniell elements ). Among other things, he published a book on encryption in telegraphy, and trained local telegraphs and made sure that the system was introduced by Samuel FB Morse . In 1856 he was back in London, where he made friends with Morse and took part in the first attempt to set up a telegraph line across the Atlantic. In 1857 he returned to India to direct the rebuilding of telegraphy after the Sepoy Uprising.

Final return to England

In 1860 he returned to England due to illness and there was a sudden change in his circumstances. He divorced and remarried and changed his surname by adding the name of a branch of his family to Brooke (perhaps with the prospect of an inheritance). Nothing is known for certain about the last 29 years of his life. Possibly he was involved in the project of a telegraph line from Europe to India via Turkey of his friend Charles T. Bright.

Others

O'Shaughnessy also made contributions to botany. He was one of the first to suggest the use of zinc or cadmium as a corrosion protection for iron in seawater.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1843 and was knighted as a Knight Bachelor in India in 1856 for his work on telegraphy .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ O'Shaughnessy, WB (1839) Case of Tetanus, Cured by a Preparation of Hemp (the Cannabis indica.), Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bengal 8, 1838-40, 462-469 digitized version ( Memento of the original from 18 June 2008 at the Internet archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ Theodor Husemann . Handbook of the entire pharmacology. Springer, Berlin 2nd ed. 1883. Volume II, pp. 1062-1066 Digitized

literature

• Winfried R. Pötsch (lead), Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989, p. 329
• JA Bridge: Sir william Brooke O'Shaughnessy: a biographical appreciation by an electrical engineer, Notes Rec. Royal Society, Vol. 52, 1998, pp. 103-120
• JB Moon: Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy: The foundations of fluid therapy and the Indian telegraph service, New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 276, 1967, pp. 283-284.
• JE Cosnett: The origins of intravenous fluid therapy , The Lancet, Volume 333, 1989, pp. 768-771.
• JE Cosnett: Dr. William Brooke O'Shaughnessy , The Old Limerick Journal, Vol. 29, 1992, pp. 13-16.
• IM Turner: The contribution of Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (1809-1889) to plant taxonomy , Phytotaxa, Volume 15, 2011, pp. 57-63

Web links

• Biography of Michael Aldrich in Antique Cannabis