George Fownes
A copy of this textbook is in the Echols Civil War Collection
George Fownes,
FRS (14 May 1815, London – 31 January 1849, Brompton, Kent)
was a British chemist. He obtained his PhD at Giesen, in Germany.
From 1842 he was chemistry professor at the Pharmaceutical Society
of Great Britain, and from 1846 at University College, London. He
was also secretary of the Chemical Society of London. In 1844, he
published a chemistry textbook. In 1842, he had been awarded the
Royal Agricultural Society's prize for his essay Food of Plants. In
1844, he received the first Actonian Prize (of 100 guineas) for his
essay Chemistry as Exemplifies the Wisdom and Beneficence of God. He
was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1845, but that same
year resigned from his academic positions due to ill health.
For his
researches in organic chemistry, he was awarded the Royal Society's
Royal Medal in 1847. He spent time in Barbados from 1847, in an
attempt to treat the pulmonary disease afflicting him, but, on his
return to England in 1848, he caught a cold and died at his father's
house in Brompton, Kent at the age of 34.
The Manual of Elementary
Chemistry was one of the Civil War medical books issued to the
medical personnel during the War by the Surgeon General of the
United States Army. Fownes, Elementary Chemistry.
(The personal edited research
notes of Michael Echols, the source of which may or
may not be completely documented)
