The Awards Committee of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy has awarded the 2018 AIHP Glenn Sonnedecker Prize to Gregory Bond, PhD, for his article, “‘Yet in All This Library There is Scarcely a Reference to the Negro in Pharmacy’: The University of Wisconsin’s Leo Butts, Pioneering Historian of African-American Pharmacists.” Leo Vinton Butts, class of 1920, was the first known black graduate of the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy, and his senior thesis, “The Negro in Pharmacy,” was one of the earliest scholarly attempts to document the history and the contemporary status of African-Americans in the profession of pharmacy.
The AIHP Glenn Sonnedecker Prize is awarded for the best article published during the previous year in a peer-reviewed journal about the history of some facet of pharmacy practice or pharmacy education in the United States. Dr. Bond’s Sonnedecker Prize-winning article was published in AIHP’s Pharmacy in History (vol. 59, nos. 1-2 (2017), pp 34-46).
John Swann, PhD, Chair of AIHP’s Award Committee, said that the article “does a wonderful job in capturing the unique experiences faced in both pharmacy education and pharmacy practice by Leo Butts, and importantly contextualizes those life experiences as a black man in a very white world.” Dr. Swann stated that the article “truly goes to the heart of the kind of work that the Sonnedecker Prize aims to recognize.”
Dr. Bond is the Assistant Director of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. He received his PhD in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals and edited collections and has also written articles for numerous popular publications, including the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Wisconsin State Journal. He continues to research the history of African-American pharmacy practice and African-American pharmacy education.
