The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy is thrilled to announce that the latest batch of trade catalogs, digitized in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC), is now live!
The AIHP jointly holds one of the top pharmaceutical trade catalog collections in the world and has been working with UWDCC since 2021 to make them available on the Digital Collections website. The AIHP and UWDCC have digitized 38 catalogs to date, totaling 14,413 pages. Additionally, the AIHP and UWDCC have collaborated to digitize 840 photos from the Drug Topics Photo Collection.
The trade catalogs in the collection date from 1829 to 2000 and highlight medicines, chemicals, products, and equipment used and sold by pharmacies. They can help historians track wholesale pricing over time, learn what medicines and products were available when, and provide a visual record of packaging design. They’re also full of incredible illustrations and typography that can be used as a reference for contemporary artists and graphic designers.
For example, the latest set of trade catalogs digitized includes a number of catalogs for druggists’ labels. These refer to printed or handwritten labels that pharmacists would use when dispensing medications or giving information about in-house products sold at their pharmacies. Labels were a way of distinguishing the pharmacist from his or her competitors. In 1911, an article in The Chemist and Druggist advised that “every label is an advertisement, and care should be taken to make it an effective one.” In short, labels in the recently digitized trade catalogs provide valuable information to historians about medicines, compounding, and pharmacy locations; however, they also serve as a record of developments in commercial design and printing, as well as marketing and advertising.
In 2023, UW-Madison School of Pharmacy archivist Hannah Swan presented a short video at the Society for Textual Scholarship’s annual conference on the interconnected history of pharmacy labels and printing histories. To watch the video, along with many other engaging videos related to the history of pharmacy, visit the AIHP YouTube channel!
