Memoirs of a Modern Medicine Man

This volume describes a career in pharmacy spanning the age of botanical mixtures from the corner drug store to modern large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing. The author was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1885, graduated from Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in 1904, and completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at Yale in 1908. As a student he clerked in retail drug stores, primarily one owned by his uncle, and became a licensed pharmacist. After finishing his Ph.D. he moved to Chicago, working at the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry which was just beginning to enforce the provisions of the Food and Drug Act of 1906. In 1913 he became the first chemist to work at the Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He was director of research at the Upjohn Company from the time when he was the sole member of the department to when it employed dozens of active researchers covering a wide range of investigations. He developed several nationally-known pharmaceutical products, such as Digitora, Citrocarbonate, Super D Cod Liver Oil, Adrenal Cortical Extract, Sex Hormones, and Germicides, whose histories are described in separate chapters. The book concludes with a description of the early manufacturing successes for penicillin, when multiple private firms in the U.S. developed penicillin from an unstable, difficult to manufacture drug to a mass-produced low-cost product whose adoption and widespread use was unprecedented