Growth into a Scientific Discipline: The Nineteenth Century - Important Figures of Analytical Chemistry from Germany in Brief Biographies - page 53

Fig. 3.4 Portrait of Karl
Friedrich Mohr (1806-1879)
some other heavy metals in (biological) fluids for the detection of poisonings and
his contributions to chemical microscopy [ 31 ]: “Application of the microscope to
the testing of minerals and chemical compounds makes greater progress from day
to day, and the microscope approximates the spectroscope with regard to the rec-
ognition of smallest amounts of oxides, superseding the latter in so far, that it pro-
vides hints to the present amounts of a constituent.”
Although Szabadváry [ 32 ] criticizes these remarks of Reinsch as being exag-
gerated, it can certainly be accepted at least for some minerals, when, e.g. for
granite, the relative content of microscopical constituents can eventually even be
estimated by counting areas.
On the other hand, microscopical identification of components—also of residues
of isolation procedures from biological specimens and at least after purification and
sublimation—has come in use in the nineteenth century and remained in common
use for several decades after 1900. In toxicological laboratories, microsublimation,
microscopic melting point determination and microcrystal reactions have remained
in daily practice before chromatography and later hyphenated instrumental princi-
ples entered the detection of poisons isolated from biological samples.
Julius Adolf S töckhardt (born 4 January 1809, Röhrsdorf near Meissen; died 1
June 1886, Tharandt near Dresden)
Stöckhardt was the son of a priest. After his apprenticeship in a phar-
macy, he studied pharmacy and chemistry in Berlin (1833 Staatsprüfung /State
Examination), worked afterwards in Koblenz and then—after visiting chemical
factories and institutes in Belgium, England, France, Switzerland and Dresden—
went to work in a factory for mineral water (Struve, Dresden). After his gradua-
tion at the Universität Leipzig (thesis on methods of scientific education) in 1836,
he became a Professor at the Staatsgewerbeschule Chemnitz (State College of