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| Zwei unterschiedliche Modelle |
From 1800 on, doctors seldom burned, but etched all the more. Popular was the so-called hellstone, which, as the name suggests, burned away everything "devilish". When one was still searching for the philosopher's stone (lapis philosophorum), it was common to call "stones" in this way:
- Lapis Lazuli (Lazurstein, jewelery and seal stone).
- Lapis causticus (soapstone, caustic soda or potassium (NaOH, KOH)).
- Lapis infernalis (Hellstone, Silver Nitrate).
(From Robert Wolf, The Language of Chemistry, On the Development and Structure of a Terminology, Dümmler Verlag Bonn, 1971).
Production of the "Lapis infernalis" in the laboratory
The chemical silver nitrate (argentum nitricum) AgNO3 is made by dissolving silver in concentrated nitric acid:
3Ag + 4HNO3 -> 3AgNO3 + 2H2O + NO.
The resulting nitric oxide (NO) changes to reddish-brown, toxic and pungent-smelling nitrogen dioxide (NO2) on contact with the air. Silver nitrate is a strong oxidizer. It can attack organic tissue, reducing silver ions to elemental silver and oxidizing the organic material. Silver nitrate forms colorless, tabular crystals, but also comes as a white, crystalline powder on the market. Silver nitrate is a crystalline compound that forms when dissolving silver in nitric acid. It is very slightly soluble in water and ethanol: melting point at 209 ° C; when heated to about 440 ° C decomposition takes place with deposition of metallic silver and release of nitrous gases. It must be stored well sealed and protected from light in brown glass bottles, since even small amounts of dust are sufficient to reduce silver nitrate under the influence of light to finely divided silver. In contrast, very pure silver nitrate is not sensitive to light.
Use
Silver nitrate flocks out protein to form silver albumin. As a result of skin contact, black spots quickly form - which presumably led to the name "Höllenstein". Silver nitrate does not only eat protruding tissue, so-called "wild meat", but also the pen into which it was embedded, in particular the solder joints. Hence the increasing use of wood frames.
Silver nitrate was formerly used to treat epilepsy (epilepsy) and resulted in lead-colored skin pigmentation, the so-called argyria, in a chemical-toxic can. Previously, silver nitrate in the form of pills was used in the treatment of gastric ulcer (ulcer ventriculi and duodeni) and Paul Ehrlich, who died in World War I, added silver atoms to the first remedy for the venereal disease syphilis - the arsenic salversan - which he called silver salversan. Hellstone was once used mainly to prophylactic gonorrhea (which may have been present in the mother) infants in the eyes shortly after birth, which probably hurt like hell (Hellstone). This was also called the CREDE prophylaxis. The possibly subsequent, "chemical" conjunctivitis with z.T. massive purulent secretion was not uncommon and often meant a considerable irritation of the child and a disturbance of the mother. The Credé prophylaxis with silver nitrate did not prevent the conjunctivitis by other pathogens such as staphylococci or Haemophilus influenzae or Chlamydia trachomatis, but seemed to conventional medicine only against gonococci.
The two pens presented here are from the "Metzer Wunderkiste"
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