When I use a word . . . The languages of medicines—chemical names

Abstract

The first efforts to introduce a systematic nomenclature for chemicals were initiated by four French chemists, proponents of the antiphlogistic theory, Guyton de Morveau, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, Claude Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François Fourcroy, who published a volume titled Méthode de nomenclature chimique in 1787, under the aegis of l’Académie des Sciences. Later efforts in the field by the Swedish chemist Baron Jöns Jacob Berzelius and the German chemists Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler were followed by the institution of international committees, begun in 1860 by the German organic chemist August Kekulé and culminating in the foundation, in 1919, of the International Union of Chemistry, which, in 1947, was renamed The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Today IUPAC combines the languages of chemical nomenclatures with computer language in the form of machine-readable chemical identifiers, setting international standards.