One hundred years : Wellcome: in pursuit of excellence / Gilbert Macdonald.

  • Macdonald, Gilbert.
Date:
1980
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: One hundred years : Wellcome: in pursuit of excellence / Gilbert Macdonald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The Founders WELLCOME'S MAGIC INK. Tliu Greatest Wonder of th« Aget This is something entirely New and .Novel ! Direction is - Write with quill or golden pen. on white paper. No ■ace is visible until held to the tire, when it becomes very lack. PREPARED ONLY BY 3EI. S wellcome, g.midkn nrv. MISS. * » w » $ S. C. H EIXCO.WE & Co.. / 2 Dritggiats & Chemists. J * (.'anion Cit)-, Minn. 5 M X MIMICN Wfcxtf KM N KM K X X * «t« The firm of Burroughs Wellcome & Co. was established in London on Monday 27 September 1880, when a deed of partnership was completed between two American pharmacists - Silas M. Burroughs and Henry S. Wellcome. Both men were entrepreneurs with flair, initiative and enormous energy. Burroughs, aged thirty-four, was the senior partner but he died of pneumonia in 1895. Wellcome, twenty- seven, lived on until 1936 and it was he who made the major contribution to the Company's growth and prosperity. Henry Wellcome was the younger son of Solomon Wellcome, a farmer-preacher from Almond, Wisconsin. He was educated in a traditional log cabin frontier school where he developed some of the thrust and drive which characterised his later activities. At the age of nine he was involved in an American Indian uprising - and in later life in London he devoted much time, energy and money to the welfare of the Indians in the land of his childhood. Henry came of a deeply religious family. Not only his father but his two uncles were ordained ministers. It was this background which stimulated him, when he was twenty-one, to write to his parents: 'I have always had a desire for wealth and still have. . . but I want to live a life devoted to the true God and to mankind! At the age of thirteen, however, he had his first experience of the medical world - helping in the family drug store in Garden City, Minnesota. Those were the days of horse and buggy medicines, and this was Henry Wellcome's introduction to the pharmacy of the day. His medical-scientific bent was stimulated by his uncle, Dr Jacob Wellcome, and an English chemist, H.J. Barton, who had settled in the community. Henry soon thought it was time to move on, and he took a post with a firm of pharmaceutical chemists, Pool and Geisinger, in the nearby town of Rochester. He took with him a testimonial signed by fourteen Garden City notables, an early example of the skilful use of publicity and public relations which he neither lost nor abused throughout his business life. In Rochester he was befriended and influenced by another doctor - William Mayo, father of the two sons 'Dr Will' and 'Dr Charlie' who were subsequently to found their famous clinic there. Henry, realising the advantages of a qualification, moved first to a college in Chicago and then to the College in Philadelphia where he graduated in pharmacy in 1874. Silas Burroughs was an outstanding promoter of new ideas and products, with immense technical expertise. He was born in 1846, seven years before Wellcome and several hundred miles east in Medina, New York. He spent his youth and early manhood in pharmacies in Lockport and Buffalo before moving to Philadelphia. He graduated in 1877, returned to John Wyeth & Brother,