Etidorhpa: The Strange History of a Mysterious Being (Forgotten Books)
About the Author:"John Uri Lloyd (19 April 1849 - 9 April 1936) was an American pharmacist influential in the fields of pharmacognosy, ethnobotany, economic botany, and herbalism. Born in upstate New York to teachers Nelson Marvin Lloyd and Sophia Webster, his family moved to Florence and Petersburg in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio in 1853. Lloyd took an apprenticeship with chemist William J.M. Gordon when he was 14 and later apprenticed with George Eger.His younger brothers Nelson Ashley Lloyd (1851-1926) and Curtis Gates Lloyd (1859-1926) entered the field as well, and in 1886 the brothers renamed the Merrell and Thorpe Company as Lloyd Brothers, Pharmacists, Inc.In 1919 Lloyd and his two brothers established trusts to prepetually fund the Lloyd Library and Museum. Today the Lloyd Library and Museum is considered by many to house the finest collections in the world devoted to Eclectic Medicine, medical botany and pharmacy.After Lloyd's death, S.B. Penick bought the firm in 1938, and in 1960 the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Hoechst AG purchased the operations. Lloyd's innovations include a "cold still" for plant extractions and the first buffered alkaloid called alcresta (made with hydrous aluminium silicate). His most enduring legacy is the Lloyd Library and Museum and a series of local color novels about the Northern Kentucky area, and Etidorhpa, a scientific allegory that some consider the first real work of science fiction."(Quote from wikipedia.org)