This section is from the book "Materia Medica And Therapeutics Inorganic Substances", by Charles D. F. Phillips. Also available from Amazon: Materia medica and therapeutics.
By dissolving purified bismuth in nitric acid, and then adding citric acid and solution of ammonia until the precipitate at first formed is redissolved. (A better form for this preparation has been published - Pharmaceutical Journal, 1866.)
A colorless liquid, of saline metallic taste, miscible with water. Liquor potassae precipitates the white hydrate, and hydrochloric acid the white oxychloride, but an excess of acid redissolves this as chloride. The officinal solution is described as neutral, or slightly alkaline, but it frequently contains an excess of nitric acid, much more than the original preparation of Schacht.
 
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