AIHP is pleased to announce that Professor Michael A. Flannery has received the 2020 Sonnedecker Prize for his article, “Government as Apothecary: Civil War Pharmacy and the Common Good,” The article was published in AIHP’s journal, Pharmacy in History (vol. 61, no. 1-2 (2019), pp. 3-14). The AIHP Glenn Sonnedecker Prize is awarded annually to recognize the best published article in a peer-reviewed publication during the preceding year on the history of some facet of pharmacy practice or pharmacy education in the United States.
“Government as Apothecary” examines how the operation during the Civil War of two US government laboratories (the Army laboratory in Philadelphia and the Naval laboratory in Brooklyn) influenced large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing in subsequent decades. AIHP’s Awards Committee cited the article for its “sophisticated… approach to historiography…, [an] impressive command of the sources and a convincing and novel set of arguments about the origins of the American pharmaceutical industry as well as impacts on pharmacy practice.”
Professor Flannery is Professor Emeritus of UAB Libraries, University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is a longtime AIHP member and has been a member of the International Academy of the History of Pharmacy since 1996. He also served as book review editor for Pharmacy in History for many years.
Professor Flannery has authored numerous articles for such journals as the Journal of the History of Medicine, Economic Botany and Pharmacy in History. He is also the author of several books on the history of American pharmacy, including John Uri Lloyd: The Great American Eclectic (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (CRC Press, 2004), and Civil War Pharmacy: A History, (Southern Illinois University Press; 2d ed. 2017). He is the co-author of America’s Botanico-Medical Movements: Vox Populi (with Alex Berman) (CRC Press 2001), and Pharmaceutical Education in the Queen City: 150 Years of Service (with Dennis Worthen) (CRC Press, 2001).
AIHP established the Glenn Sonnedecker Prize in 2015 in honor of Professor Glenn Sonnedecker for his extraordinary contributions to the field of the history of pharmacy.
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Read MoreUpcoming events hosted by AIHP
June 11, 2025, 12:00 pm (Central): Influence and Cooperation: How British and US Pharmacopoeias shaped each other, 1720-1990
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Upcoming events of interest to pharmacists and historians of pharmacy, pharmaceuticals, medicines, science, and related fields.
November 13-16, 2025: History of Science Society Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA.
November 16-18, 2025: APhA Joint Federal Pharmacy Seminar 2025, Fort Lauderdale, FL.
December 7-11, 2025: ASHP Midyear, Las Vegas, NV.
July 18-21, 2026: AACP Pharmacy Education, Grapevine, TX.