Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
Papers from the Second International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Eger, Hungary, 16–19 August, 1995) - Lichocka, Halina: The Methodological Problems of Organis Chemistry in the First Half of the 19th Century – Jedrzej Sniadeckis work
studies of fermentation that gave rise to the in vitro method. Its origin goes back to experiments on physiological phenomena. The first of such experiments was the experiment conducted by Lázaro Spallanzani, who obtained digestive juices from the stomachs of living animals and people by means a piece of sponge attached to a string, and then examined the action of those juices on various kinds of food. The Empirical Orientation The methods which proved to be the most effective and to have the most far-ranging consequences for advances in knowledge of organic compounds were the ones that stemmed from pharmacies and artisans' workshops. Proven and well-tried methods, originating in the times of alchemy, and used to obtain preparations in medicine, tanning, fabric production and other fields, consisted in all kinds of distillation, extraction, filtration, crystallization etc. At a time when chemical analysis began to play an ever increasing role as tool of gaining knowledge, the style of research on raw materials of an organic origin was being modified towards limiting physical operations and a wider application of methods that were at the disposal of chemistry. Indeed, the practical importance of analytic research was the driving force behind it and strengthened its status to the extent it began to be treated as the main current of research in organic chemistry. This is how Jan Krzyzanowski, member of the Society for Elementary Books (Towarzystwo do Ksiag Elementarnych) and author of a chemistry textbook viewed this problem in 1827: "...determining the direct combinations of both plant and animal nature, their properties and composition from inorganic elements, as well as their mutual interaction and their interaction with combinations of inorganic bodies, is the subject-matter of organic chemistry". 11 At the same time Adam M. Kitajewski gave lectures at the Warsaw University 12 on indirect vegetable elements, as he called the products of natural reactions of plant substances with chemical reagents. He argued that may such compounds could easily be obtained in an artificial way, for it was sufficient to change but one element or a stoichiometric proportion to transform a one kind of substance obtained from a plant into another. Isolating substances formed in vivo in the course of physiological processes of living organisms and subjecting such substances to various chemical reactions in vitro, led researchers to obtain a whole range of compounds that had previously been unknown and generally did not appear in nature, and which - due to their origin - were also termed organic.
