Christian Friedrich Bucholz

Christian Friedrich Bucholz was a German pharmaceutical chemist, born in Eisleben on 19 September 1770 and dying on 9 June 1818. His father was an apothecary who died when the boy was five, after which his mother married an Erfurt pharmacist named Voigt, who with an uncle trained him in laboratory technique. He apprenticed from 1784 under the Kassel pharmacist Karl Wilhelm Fiedler, published his first paper in 1794 on the crystallization of barium acetate, and returned to Erfurt to take over his father's pharmacy. In 1805 he found that uranyl nitrate dissolves readily in organic solvents such as diethyl ether, a result that underlies early methods of uranium purification. He received a doctorate of pharmacy in 1808, became professor of chemistry at the Erfurt Academy in 1810, and in 1816 published a note on extracting capsaicin, the pungent component of chilli peppers, in crude form. He was imprisoned when the French occupied Erfurt in 1813, and ill health later led to blindness.