Drugstore Memories: American Pharmacists Recall Life Behind the Counter, 1824-1933

Drugstore Memories: American Pharmacists Recall Life Behind the Counter, 1824-1933

Editor: Glenn Sonnedecker, David L. Cowen, and Gregory J. Higby, eds.
Publisher: American Institute of the History of Pharmacy
Year Published: 2002
Pages: 154
ISBN: 0-931292-38-7
AIHP#: BKS14
Price: $15.00 ($9.00 for members)

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Praise for Drugstore Memories:

“This book is a view from the ground of health care in the United States in the period between 1824 and 1933. The text consists entirely of ‘unpolished and unexpurgated’ quotations from 59 practicing pharmacists…. This book should interest both the specialist and the non-specialist. Within the limitations of a multi-authored work written from ‘the ground,’ it offers a good and often charming view of pharmacy (with a glimpse of medicine and sociology) as it was practiced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the profound changes that occurred after the Second World War.” –New England Journal of Medicine


Preface: “Here are ordinary practitioners, telling in their own words what it was like behind the counter. They hail from places as far apart as a teeming immigrant neighborhood in New York City and a sparsely settled Texas cowtown. They are voices of a past long gone in pharmacy, times as far apart as the days when the Revolution was still an exciting first-hand memory, and the days when these typical entrepreneurs were struggling against the Great Depression.

We searched out first-hand testimonies, unpolished and unexpurgated, which were scattered in reminiscences, diaries, memoirs, letters, and the like – published an unpublished. These accounts are not history in any formal sense, but offer vivid glimpses of a vanished work-a-day world out of which present-day pharmacists evolved and inherited occupational mind-sets to be nurtured or to be surmounted…

Our modest purpose is to rescue these unique sources from the risk of being lost. Some are from defunct and disintegrating journals now more than a century old. Some are from publications to which crowded pharmacy libraries are tempted to apply the fatal euphemism, “deaccession,” since they now have only “historical” value. But our contrary belief that these voices from long ago are worth preserving, even if read simply for their inherent interest, motivated this small anthology.”


Table of Contents:

(Dates indicate the approximate time-span of each author’s observations.) Recollections are chronologically arranged.

1: Introduction, Part I: 1824-1860

Reminiscences by:

7: William A. Brewer, Sr., 1824-1860s

15: J. Brown Baxley, 1830-1850

17: Robert Shoemaker, 1832-1850

20: Charles E. Pancoast, 1832-1849

24: George Thurber, 1840-1842

36: Evan Tyson Ellis, 1840-1870

37: Alpheus P. Sharp, 1840s

38: Theodore R. Wardell, 1844-1865

39: Christian Fr. G. Meyer, 1848-1860s

41: C. V Emich, 1848-1851

41: William T. Wenzell, c. 1850-1867

42: John A. Dadd, 1850-c. 1885

45: M. Joseph Murh, c. 1851-1880

47: James Winchell Forbes, 1853-1879

53: John F. Hancock, 1854-1867

54: Joseph L. Lemberger, 1850s-1916

58: G. G. C. Simms, 1850s

58: John M. Maisch, 1850-1856

59: Albert E. Magoffin, 1856-1880s

61: Edward Parrish, 1856

63: Frederick W. Fenn, 1857

63: S. A. D. Sheppard, 1858-1868

65: Introduction, Part II: 1860-1933

Reminiscences by:

71: W P. Carstarphen, 1860-1864

72: J. H. Zielin, c. 1860-1865

74: Charles B. Johnson, 1863-1864

76: H. M. Parchen, 1860s

77: John W Ballard, 1860s

77: Fred R. Dimmitt, 1860s

78: John Best, 1866-1870s

80: John Uri Lloyd, 1860s

81: John T. Moore, c. 1860-1880

83: William H. Rogers, 1860s-1880s

85: Charles H. Zahn, 1860s-1890s

86: William L. DuBois, 1863-1916

87: John N. Hurty, 1870s

91: Fred B. Kilmer, 1870s

92: James Hartley Beal, late 1870s

93: Jacob A. Flexner, c. 1874-1893

96: B. C. Huger, 1870s?-1912

97: Mathias Noll, 1880-1920

99: Edward Kremers, c. 1885

100: Carrie E. Howard, 1886-1890

102: John W. Gray, 1886-1914

103: Josephine W. Stuart, 1890-1912

106: A. C. Meyer, 1890s

109: Frederick T. Gordon, 1890s-1912

111: William C. Alpers, 1890s

112: Walter H. Cousins [Sr.], c. 1895-1915

118: Ernest L. Harris, 1900-c. 1945

120: Shine Philips, c. 1901-1925

125: Roy Bird Cook, 1905

127: George H. Balloff, 1907-1960

130: Richard Armour, 1912-c. 1925

133: George A. Seyfarth c. 1918-1930

138: Jacob Eisen, 1920-1950

141: Hubert H. Humphrey, c. 1927-1936

143: Celia F. Handelman, 1929-c. 1940

144: William Byron Rumford, Sr., 1930-1950

146: Carl E. Kyburz, 1933

147: Bibliography

153: Author Index

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