Edward Schunck, F. R. S., a pioneer of natural-product chemistry

Abstract

Organic chemistry was, in its origin, the study of the chemical compounds found in living matter. These substances, however, are usually of so complex a composition, and so difficult to separate from one another in a pure state, that their study made little headway until attention was concentrated on the much simpler compounds present in coal gas and coal tar. Both of these were available on die industrial scale in many parts of Europe from 1820 onwards. The problems presented by these derivatives of methane and of benzene were capable of progressive solution; by the end of the century, the literature of organic chemistry was largely concerned with ‘unnatural’ compounds (1), and the science itself had to be redefined as ‘the chemistry of carbon compounds’. Of course, natural products were never entirely forgotten, and as methods of separation and structure determination increased in power, they began in the present century to take a more equal place with their unnatural relatives. Henry Edward Schunck (1820-1903), a Manchester chemist and industrialist, was one of the few who devoted their whole career to research in natural-product chemistry during the decades of its partial eclipse.