We are pleased to feature author Stephen Hall, historian, writer, archivist, and long-time contributor to the preservation of pharmacy history. Hall’s new book, A Spoonful of Sugar: The Story Of…
Eighty-five years ago today, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy was founded at the University of Wisconsin. The institution was largely the product of a collaboration between Edward…
Throughout the decades, many pharmacists have taken the coming of a new year as a time to reflect and predict what the future holds. Many of these musings were published…
As the weather grew cold, it was common for drugstores to sell “hot-sodas”, with one pharmaceutical trade magazine from 1919 stating that “Chocolates, beef bouillon, tomato puree, [and] malted milk…
Drugstores nowadays are not generally considered the best place to do your Thanksgiving shopping. In 1929, however, one columnist writing for the trade magazine Druggist’s Circular argued otherwise: “in the…
The early twentieth century saw a considerable increase in the amount of women working in medical fields. This was the product of a number of trends, including the Women’s Suffrage…
Although Catholic Sister nurses were operating in North America since the eighteenth century, waves of immigration from regions with significant Catholic populations in the nineteenth century would dramatically increase their…
Prior to 1906, the medicine market looked very different than it does today. Prescriptions were not necessary and patients were generally able to self-medicate without consulting a doctor or pharmacist….
From the 1930s to the 1980s, ads for drugs were aimed almost exclusively at pharmacists and physicians. Typically, advertising was conducted in one of two ways: ads were placed in…
In the fall of 1937, over 100 people died from consuming an antibiotic called “elixir of sulfanilamide”. This prompted a protracted scandal which would implicate drug manufacturers, pharmacists, and the…
