First Issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals Now Available Online!

AIHP is pleased to announce that the first issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. vol. 63, no. 1 (2021), the Institute’s renamed academic journal is now available online at JSTOR. AIHP members can use their JSTOR login credentials and password to access this issue. (AIHP members having difficult accessing the issue on JSTOR should contact AIHP at aihp@aihp.org). This journal issue is the first published under AIHP’s new publication partnership with the University of Wisconsin Press. Be sure to check your mailboxes, because the print version of the journal will be mailed to all members and subscribers within the next two weeks.

A subscription to History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals is one of the benefits of AIHP membership, and a portion of member dues members covers subscriptions costs.

History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals continues Pharmacy in History, the academic journal AIHP has published since 1959, but the design and layout of the journal has undergone a comprehensive “top-to-bottom” review under the direction of Editor-in-Chief Lucas Richert, PhD, and Managing Editor Gregory Bond, PhD. “The journal will have a fresh new look,” Dr. Bond stated, “but the same high-quality scholarship for which Pharmacy in History was known.”

The first issue includes four scholarly articles, all of which are based on papers presented at the “New Social History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals Festival,” an online conference co-sponsored by AIHP and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy in September 2020.

Laura Robson-Mainwaring’s article, “‘Own Name,’ ‘No Name,’ and ‘the Plague of Fancy Names’: Trademarks in the British Pharmaceutical Market, c. 1875–1920,” reconsiders branded medicines in the British marketplace and draws on scholarship from business historians to show that brands were redefined during the late nineteenth century as a result of trademark legislation, particularly the Trade Marks Registration Act 1875. The article also explores how trademarks were used as a regulatory and communicative device within a chain of distribution.

Toine Pieters’ article, “The Battle Between David and Goliath: Drug Making and the Dutch Pharmacist versus the International Pharmaceutical Industry, 1865–2020,” explores how Dutch pharmacists at the end of the nineteenth century succeeded in presenting non-branded, compounded drugs as a therapeutically and economically competitive alternative to the industrially manufactured, packaged, and branded medicines that were then replacing the manually made magistral medicines of pharmacists. The article shows how the international pharmaceutical industry (“Goliath”) did not appreciate the craftsmanship of the Dutch pharmacist (“David”), who could legally disregard drug patents as long as they produced medicine on a one-to-one, magistral prescription basis.

In his article, “Medical Missions, Pharmaceutical Commerce, and Drug Consumption: The Introduction of Cocaine to China, 1887–1910,” Yun Huang explores the arrival—and the use—of cocaine in China from the 1880s to the 1910s and argues that two groups were instrumental in the emergence of commerce in cocaine: Protestant missionaries, who used modern medicines in their work as healers, and agents for the burgeoning European and American pharmaceutical industries, who were keen to build new markets in Asia. The article asserts that cocaine became a tool of the Western medical establishment and ultimately of colonialism and cultural imperialism.

In the Visual Pharmacy section, Erika Dyck and Mat Saveli write about “Crafting the Modern via Psychoactivity Advertisements.” They examine advertisements for psychoactive products sold in five different geo-political jurisdictions: Canada, Colombia, Yugoslavia, India, and Senegal. They argue that the sale of these products was inextricably bound up with ideas of modernity, nation-building, and a homogenizing of global attitudes towards the benefits of psychoactivity. Advertisers used these ideas to suggest that being modern and performing modernity required the consumption of psychoactive products to cope with the associated strains of being or becoming modern—an idea that applied to individual consumers as well as nations. Dyck and Savelli argue that the history of psychoactive products and modernity are deeply interconnected.

In the recurring Conversations department, Rafaela Zorzanelli interview Toine Pieters, who has written broadly about the history of pharmacy, medicines, and diseases. Pieters argues that a rational understanding of substances cannot fully account for their agency and cyclical trajectory, and he suggests that scholars must address the tension between realism and constructivism to better understand the complexity of medicinal and pharmaceutical substances.

The issue also features 11 book reviews on topics ranging from Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518-1824 to Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge and Place in South African Drug Discovery.

After reviewing the first issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, AIHP invites members to send comments and feedback to us at aihp@aihp.org.