1st semester

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Students,

on this page you will find information concerning the course "General and analytical chemistry of inorganic drugs, excipients and harmful substances (including pharmacopoeial methods)" in the first semester.

A note in advance: Please always pay attention to the current notices in the showcase of the first semester as well as the notes in the Learnweb! As a student, you have, among other things, a duty to cooperate in examinations, i.e. you have the duty to inform yourself about all examination matters. This also applies in particular to a duty to inform about registration and examination dates.

The practical course on "General and Analytical Chemistry of Inorganic Drugs, Excipients, and Harmful Substances (Including Pharmacopoeial Methods)" offers first-semester pharmacy students an introduction to the identity reactions and purity tests of the European Pharmacopoeia (Pharmacopoeia Europaea, Ph. Eur.), accompanying the theoretical courses (lecture, seminars). The practical course provides many students with their first exciting insights into laboratory practice, chemical substance properties and laws. In addition to the acquisition of theoretical knowledge, an interdisciplinary natural science such as pharmacy depends to a large extent on experimental experience. Even in times of increasingly sophisticated instrumental analytics, the specific identity reactions and purity tests of modern pharmacopoeias are of considerable importance for drug safety due to the usually rapid and meaningful identification of relevant ions, functional groups and compounds. The necessary examination of the different types of chemical reactions and their experimental illustration in the practical course, which is linked to a large number of identity reactions and purity tests, contributes significantly to the acquisition of a sound chemical knowledge and thus forms the basis for understanding the effect of modern drugs at the molecular level. In addition to the formal assignment of an identity reaction to a chemical reaction type, it is, for example, the substances precipitating from a solution, the colors of solutions or precipitates, the solubility behavior or a microscopically or macroscopically recognizable characteristic crystal form that should also make a chemical experiment tangible with the senses and arouse interest in experimental work. In addition to the identity and purity tests of the pharmacopoeia, special importance is attached to the development of an inorganic chemical and analytical understanding and the learning of basic chemical working techniques and behavior in the laboratory. This provides an important basis for laboratory work in the subsequent practical courses of the pharmacy degree program. Due to their training, pharmacists are considered to have comprehensive expertise in the handling of medicinal substances and a wide range of hazardous substances. For this reason, special attention is paid to the properties of substances and the safety aspects associated with the use of certain medicines, excipients and harmful substances as early as the first semester, with the aim of minimizing hazards as far as possible and enabling safe working not only in the pharmaceutical university internships (see DGUV Information 213-026, Safety Instruction).

In principle, first-semester pharmacy students can attend the lecture and participate in the first-semester practical without any special prior knowledge.  Due to the abundance of material and the foreseeable high time burden due to the internship - which takes place in the afternoon during the first semester - it is advisable and makes sense to continuously, dedicatedly and intensively deal with the teaching content presented in the lecture, seminar and internship from the very beginning (this does not only apply to pharmaceutical chemistry!).

To prepare for the study of pharmacy or for self-study, good textbooks can certainly be consulted for the beginning. Furthermore, there are several very useful textbooks of general and inorganic chemistry, which cover the essential basics of general and inorganic chemistry for first semester students (see the provided literature list). In addition, lecture and seminar scripts are provided on Learnweb (!). To access them, you usually need your user ID and the enrollment key. You will receive both at the beginning of the semester. Please remember to register as soon as possible in the Learnweb of the WWU, since information (announcements, dates, scripts, lists, etc.) is increasingly passed on by the lecturers via this medium.