Pills and profits : the selling of medicines since 1870 : an exhibition at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine / Ken Arnold, Tilli Tansey.

  • Arnold, Ken, 1960-
Date:
1994
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Pills and profits : the selling of medicines since 1870 : an exhibition at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine / Ken Arnold, Tilli Tansey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    part I THE FOUNDING OF THE WELLCOME PHYSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES: CONFLICT OR CONCORD IN MEDICAL RESEARCH The pharmaceutical industry is a hybrid of mixed parentage: it has close associations with both commerce and the medical arts of healing and comfort. Throughout its comparatively short history this tension has result- ed in the industry being subjected to numerous forms of criticism: medical, ethical, political and scientific. At the centre of all this is the fundamental distaste associated with the idea of profits accruing from those who suffer, however remote or tenuous the relationship may be. Thus a successful phar- maceutical company, whose business is making revenue from medicines intended to relieve, cure or prevent illness and disease, is inevitably faced with the charge of benefiting from the very misery they attempt to alleviate. The conflict between commerce and cure became particularly heated towards the end of the nineteenth century, as medical practitioners sought to profes- sionalise and to distance themselves from quacks, mountebanks and other unqualified persons. Simultaneously, the aspirations of chemists, druggists and pharmacists, and the increasing incursion of industrial technology and scientific knowledge into the processes of discovering and manufacturing drugs, coalesced; thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a pharma- ceutical industry had been established in Britain. Several tensions emerged from these innovations. The association between commerce and medicine was put into sharp focus, not so much because medi- cines were bought and sold - which by then was a normal part of the medical encounter - but because of the rise of a new type of business, not only with claims to medical and scientific expertise, but also with ambitious commercial interests in the marketplace. Throughout the twentieth century the interac- tions between these two ambivalent components of the industry, and the rela- tionship of that industry with medical, scientific and public opinion, provide windows through which to view and assess the profits, both financial and medical, that accrued from the pills. In the early-seventeenth century apothecaries, the specialists who pre- pared medicines, broke away from the Grocers' Company to establish their own trade Guild. This caused an early dispute with the authorities of the