pharmaceutical history Archives - British Society for the History of Medicine

Snake oil charms of popular medical history

Lee Coppack — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 11:15:56 +0000

The mention of ‘snake oil charms’ in the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament in July reminded me of one of the most unusual cases I encountered in my final years as a consultant surgeon, writes Bryan Rhodes. A middle-aged man had gone for a stroll close to Fell Foot Park in the Lake […]

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Robert Drane – a leader of pharmaceutical education in Wales, antiquarian and naturalist

Lee Coppack — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 09:33:44 +0000

Having never visited Wales before, 22 year old Robert Drane moved to Cardiff on 8 February 1856, and the history of pharmacy – and pharmacy education – in Cardiff are very much tied up with him. Briony Hudson explains. A contemporary described Drane as “a young man with a charming manner, a striking appearance and […]

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Recycling Penicillin from Urine in Post-War Germany

Lee Coppack — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 14:53:45 +0000

Limited supplies of penicillin and Allied restrictions on German access to the drug in the immediate aftermath of World War II led to its recovery from the urine of treated patients. Susanne Krejsa MacManus explains. German research on penicillin started only in 1942 and then on a very small scale.[1] Gerhard Domagk (1895-1964), the German […]

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Control and the therapeutic trial: the influence of insulin

Lee Coppack — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 09:53:52 +0000

How do we decide whether a drug, or other treatment, actually works? Martin Edwards describes the rhetorical strategy adopted by the Medical Research Council to establish its authority. Patients’ variations in response to disease and treatment can render it fiendishly difficult to know whether a therapy is benefitting a particular individual. For centuries, the gold […]

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The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis

Edward Wawrzynczak — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 02:08:05 +0000

The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis was originally published in Latin by the Royal College of Physicians in 1618 and translated into English by Nicholas Culpepper in the middle of the seventeenth century. To celebrate its 400th anniversary an illustrated version of the book is to be published later this year. I am delighted to be one of […]

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Finding the “missing link”

Edward Wawrzynczak — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 11:51:31 +0000

Historians will be familiar with the challenges of researching an archive: sifting through a pile of dusty records, drawing a blank in a confusing catalogue, or scoring hundreds of hits searching an electronic database. With the help of an archive expert, however, the rewards outweigh the effort required. When preparing for my presentation on English […]

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Mystery Plant in the Apothecaries’ Garden

Edward Wawrzynczak — Thu, 25 May 2017 19:49:39 +0000

What is the link between this plant and an essay publishes 200 years ago by a surgeon apothecary in East London? The answer will appear here in the middle of June.

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Christmas and the Chemist: The Pretty Thermometer and other marketing ploys from the nineteenth century

Edward Wawrzynczak — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:37:42 +0000

“Gentlemen – I have the honour to wish you a scientific Christmas and a drug-devouring New Year” – Fred Reynolds, co-founder of the British Pharmaceutical Conference[i] The concept of Christmas adverts feels very twenty-first century, particularly with the rise of emotionally intense adverts that use neuroscience to research how to effectively communicate with the consumer’s […]

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Dogs cakes and drug doctoring: dogs and the retail chemist at the turn of the 19th century.

Edward Wawrzynczak — Sat, 27 Aug 2016 14:21:12 +0000

August 26th marks National Dog Day.[i] The dog is of great importance to the history of medicine. Dogs have played a role for developing new treatments for an array of diseases, most notably diabetes mellitus. In 1889 Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski demonstrated that by removing the pancreas from a dog, the animal developed diabetes: […]

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