The apothecaries' system, or apothecaries' weights and measures, is a historical system of mass and volume units that were used by physicians and apothecaries for medical prescriptions and also sometimes by scientists. The English version of the system is closely related to the English troy system of weights, the pound and grain being exactly the same in both. It divides a pound into 12 ounces, an ounce into 8 drachms, and a drachm into 3 scruples of 20 grains each. This exact form of the system was used in the United Kingdom; in some of its former colonies, it survived well into the 20th century. The apothecaries' system of measures is a similar system of volume units based on the fluid ounce. For a long time, medical recipes were written in Latin, often using special symbols to denote weights and measures.
The use of different measure and weight systems depending on the purpose was an almost universal phenomenon in Europe between the decline of the Roman Empire and metrication. This was connected with international commerce, especially with the need to use the standards of the target market and to compensate for a common weighing practice that caused a difference between actual and nominal weight. In the 19th century, most European countries or cities still had at least a "commercial" or "civil" system (such as the English avoirdupois system) for general trading, and a second system (such as the troy system) for precious metals such as gold and silver. The system for precious metals was usually divided in a different way from the commercial system, often using special units such as the carat. More significantly, it was often based on different weight standards.
The apothecaries' system often used the same ounces as the precious metals system, although even then the number of ounces in a pound could be different. The apothecaries' pound was divided into its own special units, which were inherited (via influential treatises of Greek physicians such as Dioscorides and Galen, 1st and 2nd century) from the general-purpose weight system of the Romans.
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A system of units of measurement, also known as a system of units or system of measurement, is a collection of units of measurement and rules relating them to each other. Systems of measurement have historically been important, regulated and defined for the purposes of science and commerce. Instances in use include the International System of Units or () (the modern form of the metric system), the British imperial system, and the United States customary system.
A grain is a unit of measurement of mass, and in the troy weight, avoirdupois, and apothecaries' systems, equal to exactly 64.79891 milligrams. It is nominally based upon the mass of a single ideal seed of a cereal. From the Bronze Age into the Renaissance, the average masses of wheat and barley grains were part of the legal definitions of units of mass. Expressions such as "thirty-two grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear" appear to have been ritualistic formulas, essentially the premodern equivalent of legal boilerplate.
The gram (originally gramme; SI unit symbol g) is a unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one one thousandth of a kilogram. Originally defined as of 1795 as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre [1 cm3], and at the temperature of melting ice", the defining temperature (~0 °C) was later changed to 4 °C, the temperature of maximum density of water. However, by the late 19th century, there was an effort to make the base unit the kilogram and the gram a derived unit.
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Enabling individuals who are living with reduced mobility of the hand to utilize portable exoskeletons at home has the potential to deliver rehabilitation therapies with a greater intensity and relevance to activities of daily living. Various hand exoskele ...
2016
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In this work we tackled the problem of accurate measurement of internal–external (IE) rotations in the prosthetic knee. We presented a magnetic measurement system to be implanted in the knee prostheses in order to measure IE without soft tissue artifacts. ...