ABSTRACT
Major advances in the field of medicinal chemistry during the period from 1700 to 1900 include the following:
Development of procedures to isolate pure compounds from natural sources or complex mixtures
Attributing biological activity to specific substances
Understanding of functional group arrangements in complex natural products and early structure elucidation
Development of procedures to modify isolated substances through semisynthesis in order to generate new compounds and introduction of the first semisynthetic drugs
