. The Pharmaceutical era. mortar with a pestle. It is really aprocess of grinding, the surfaces of the mortar and theface of the pestle taking the place of the abrading sur-faces of the drug mill. Trituration is usually applicable only to chemical orcrystalline substances, or those without a distinctly cel-lular structure. Drugs possessinc the latter characterare more easily comminuted by one of the processes pre-viously considered, i. e., by contusion or grinding. For the purposes of trituration the mortar and pestlemay be either of glass, porcelain, marble, or of the wareknown as wedgewood.
. The Pharmaceutical era. mortar with a pestle. It is really aprocess of grinding, the surfaces of the mortar and theface of the pestle taking the place of the abrading sur-faces of the drug mill. Trituration is usually applicable only to chemical orcrystalline substances, or those without a distinctly cel-lular structure. Drugs possessinc the latter characterare more easily comminuted by one of the processes pre-viously considered, i. e., by contusion or grinding. For the purposes of trituration the mortar and pestlemay be either of glass, porcelain, marble, or of the wareknown as wedgewood. Glass and porcelain mortars, how-ever, are easily scratched, while their smooth surfacespossess less abrading power than the other materialsnamed. The style of mortar best adapted to trituration is onewhich is broad and shallow rather than deep, and shouldbe of a capacity sufficiently great to prevent the sub-stance from being thrown over the sides during the opera-tion. (Fig. 38.) The curve of the face of the pestle and. rig. OS—jlortar lor Trituration. of the inner surface of the mortar should correspond ac-curately with one another. The handle of the pestleshould be large enough to afford a firm grasp to the handwithout too great fatigue. The process of trituration is best accomplished as fol-lows: Grasping the pestle firmly, begin at the center ofthe mortar and trace a gradually enlarging spiral pathuntil the upper edge of the powder is reached, then re-Terse the motion and cause the pestle to trace a graduallydiminishing spiral until the center is reached again, andso on. This method will insure the production of apowder of uniform fineness in much less time than can beaccomplished by an irregular rubbing in every and trituration Is per-formed on a slab of porphyry, or other hard material,with the aid of a flat-bottomed pestle known as a muller,when the process is specifically known as Levigation orPorphyrization. This metho
Size: 2167px × 1153px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, booksubjectdrugs, booksubjectpharmacy, bookyear1
