[The extractive: life and death of an uncommon product of proximate analysis]

Issued from the pharmaceutical tradition, the "extractive", formerly "extract", is a typical artefact of proximate analysis introduced in the new nomenclature of 1787. After beign one of its most active promotors, Fourcroy published with Vauquelin a posthumous paper in 1810 in which he expressed some doubts about the substance. Theoretically present in almost all vegetable extracts, some chemists, pharmacists and physicians try to isolate the extractive without success and instead accumulated contradictory results. At the end, the eviction of this chimaera held by sceptical chemists such as Chevreul and Braconnot and the conversion of other analysts, dismissed extractive and the name almost gradually disappears at the begining of the 1830s.