BiblioVault - Books about Pharmacy

Civil War Pharmacy

A History

Michael A. Flannery, with a foreword by Margaret Humphreys

Southern Illinois University Press, 2017

When the Civil War began, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry was concentrated almost exclusively in Philadelphia and was dominated by just a few major firms; when the war ended, it was poised to expand nationwide. Civil War Pharmacy is the first book to delineate how the growing field of pharmacy gained respect and traction in, and even distinction from, the medical world because of the large-scale manufacture and dispersion of drug supplies and therapeutics during the Civil War. In this second edition, Flannery captures the full societal involvement in drug provision, on both the Union and Confederate sides, and places it within the context of what was then assumed about health and healing. He examines the roles of physicians, hospital stewards, and nurses—both male and female—and analyzes how the blockade of Southern ports meant fewer pharmaceutical supplies were available for Confederate soldiers, resulting in reduced Confederate troop strength. Flannery provides a thorough overview of the professional, economic, and military factors comprising pharmacy from 1861 to 1865 and includes the long-term consequences of the war for the pharmaceutical profession.

Winner (first edition), Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences, Best Book Award

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Compound Remedies

Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain

Paula S. De Vos

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

Winner, 2022 Edward Kremers Award

Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

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Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine

By John M. Riddle

University of Texas Press, 1985

For 1,600 years Dioscorides (ca. AD 40–80) was regarded as the foremost authority on drugs. He knew mild laxatives and strong purgatives, analgesics for headaches, antiseptics for wounds, emetics to rid one of ingested poisons, chemotherapy agents for cancer treatments, and even oral contraceptives. Why, then, have his works remained obscure in recent centuries? Because of one small oversight (Dioscorides himself thought it was self-evident): he failed to describe his method for organizing drugs by their affinities. This omission led medical authorities to use his materials as a guide to pharmacy while overlooking Dioscorides' most valuable contribution—his empirically derived method for observing and classifying drugs by clinical testing.

Dioscorides' De materia medica, a five-volume work, was written in the first century. Here revealed for the first time is the thesis that Dioscorides wrote more than a lengthy guide book. He wrote a great work of science. He had said that he discovered the natural order and would demonstrate it by his arrangement of drugs from plants, minerals, and animals. Until John M. Riddle's pathfinding study, no one saw the genius of his system. Botanists from the eighteenth century often attempted to find his unexplained method by identifying the sequences of his plants according to the Linnean system but, while there are certain patterns, there remained inexplicable incoherencies. However, Dioscorides' natural order as set down in De materia medica was determined by drug affinities as detected by his acute, clinical ability to observe drug reactions in and on the body. So remarkable was his ability to see relationships that, in some cases, he saw what we know to be common chemicals shared by plants of the same and related species and other natural product drugs from animal and mineral sources.

Western European and Islamic medicine considered Dioscorides the foremost authority on drugs, just as Hippocrates is regarded as the Father of Medicine. They saw him point the way but only described the end of his finger, despite the fact that in the sixteenth century alone there were over one hundred books published on him. If he had explained what he thought to be self-evident, then science, especially chemistry and medicine, would almost certainly have developed differently. In this culmination of over twenty years of research, Riddle employs modern science and anthropological studies innovatively and cautiously to demonstrate the substance to Dioscorides' authority in medicine.

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Doctoring the Novel

Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle

Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Ohio University Press, 2012

If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?

Doctoring the Novel explores the ways in which language constructs and stabilizes these slippery terms by examining medical quackery and orthodoxy in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stark Munro Letters. Contextualized in both medical and popular publishing, literary analysis reveals that even supposedly medico-scientific concepts such as orthodoxy and quackery evolve not in elite laboratories and bourgeois medical societies but in the rough-and-tumble of the public sphere, a view that acknowledges the considerable, and often underrated, influence of language on medical practices.

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Iowa Pharmacy, 1880-1905

Experiment In Professionalism

Lee Anderson

University of Iowa Press, 1989

Popular culture remembers the settling of the Midwest as a golden era of unbounded opportunity, a time when every farm was a family farm and every farmer glowed with health. Pioneers in nineteenth-century Iowa, however, had to battle a formidable host of diseases during this golden era—malaria was endemic, smallpox and dysentery occurred in widespread epidemics, and typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, and diphtheria had their seasons. Physicians in the growing Hawkeye State had little of the status and skill they command today, and herbalists, hydropaths, eclectics, Thomsonians, and homeopaths competed with purveyors of home remedies and patent medicines for their services.

The druggists of pioneer Iowa were artisan producers who compounded and prescribed botanical and chemical medicines, sold a variety of other merchandise from perfumes to paints, and dispensed the secret concoctions known as patent medicines, guaranteed to cure any condition, however alarming. In this compelling study, Lee Anderson tells the story of these early pharmacists and their hard-fought quest to legitimize their profession. While he confronts the politics of professionalism and the purpose of the pharmaceutical science and education, he also illuminates the mutual role of physicians and pharmacists in frontier health care.

With skill and humor, Anderson recreates an exciting time in midwestern history and provides insights into national issues of professionalism in medicine. His study will appeal to scholars in the history of medicine, pharmacy, and professionalism and to everyone interested in the history of the Midwest.

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Medical Monopoly

Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry

Joseph M. Gabriel

University of Chicago Press, 2014

During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine.

Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.

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Panaceia's Daughters

Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany

Alisha Rankin

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Panaceia’s Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen’s healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen’s pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it.

Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen’s pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomen’s healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient’s experience of illness.

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Physical and Biophysical Foundations of Pharmacy Practice

Issues in Drug Delivery

Gordon L. Flynn, Michael S. Roberts

Michigan Publishing Services, 2015

Focused on the physical and biological barriers and opportunities for drug delivery, this book, published in cooperation with the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, is a peer-reviewed introductory physical pharmacy and biopharmaceutics text that comprehensively addresses the major issues in the field of Pharmacy Practice. It is a must for students wishing to understand the background and mechanics of dosage form technology.

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