The proposed merger between Glaxo Wellcome and Smithkline Beecham will create the world’s largest drugs group, which is to have its headquarters in New York. So it seems in some strange way as if the British pharmaceutical firm founded by Henry Wellcome will be going home
Henry Wellcome and a fellow pharmacist, Silas H. Burroughs, came to England in 1880. They founded Burroughs Wellcome&Co as an agency to import American drugs. But only two years later the firm was making its own products in a basement at Snow Hill, London.
Henry Wellcome was the company’s sole owner for 40 years after the death of Silas Burroughs in 1895. In 1924 he brought all his business interests together under the name of the Wellcome Trust.
Henry Solomon Wellcome was born in poverty on 21 August, 1853, at Almond, Wisconsin, the son of the Reverend S. C. Wellcome, farmer and Adventist minister, and Mary Curtis Wellcome. And although this was during the years of frequent wars between the white settlers and the North American Indians, the family moved still further west in 1861 to a place which was then no more than a settlement — Garden City, Minnesota. There, Henry’s uncle, a surgeon, owned a drug store.
In 1862 the settlement was attacked by Sioux native people and this incident had a profound influence on Henry’s life. Only nine years of age, he had to cast lead bullets for the settlers, and afterwards help his uncle to care for the wounded.
But it was the subsequent hanging of 38 Siouxs that Henry Wellcome never forgot. He felt strong compassion for them as trains of settlers moving west trespassed across their land. The settlers took what they wanted from the native peoples’ rich valleys which had valuable minerals in the surrounding mountains. And no one would have been more gratified than Henry Wellcome, had he lived to know, that now many years later, some compassion to the native peoples has been shown.
Henry Wellcome’s early experience bred in him a conscientious regard for the welfare of all mankind, and also of animals. Caring was to become his life’s work. From boyhood, and throughout his life, he collected medical books from all parts of the world. He learnt to swim and canoe with a native-like adeptness in the frontier creeks — skills he later put to good use.
At 17, he became a prescription clerk in Poole and Geisinger’s pharmacy at Rochester, Minnesota. Upstairs was the office of Dr William Mayo who encouraged him to enrol at the Chicago college of pharmacy. From there, Henry took a job in Thomas Whitfield’s pharmacy, graduating a year later to the Philadelphia college of pharmacy where he met fellow student Silas Burroughs, who later became his business partner.
But in 1873, life for Henry was still hard. He wrote from Philadelphia that he had not a whole pair of pants or boots to his name. He finally graduated in 1874 and spent the next few years as a salesman for the New York pharmaceutical house of Mckesson&Robbins. He travelled on mule-back through the cinchona forests of Peru and Ecuador and, as quinine preparations from cinchona bark were fast gaining medical importance, he made them a special study. His paper on the subject was published in the Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association and in The Pharmaceutical Journal.
Four years after arriving in England he founded the firm Burroughs Wellcome. The firm’s compressed tablets had become widely known for their accurate dosage and were given the name "Tabloid"— a word registered in 1884 and personally coined by Henry Wellcome from the words "tablet"and "alkaloid". Later he went to court to defend "Tabloid"as the Burroughs Wellcome trademark, and eventually won his case.
In 1885 Henry Wellcome was awarded the Royal Humane Society bronze medal for rescuing, at great personal risk, a fellow canoeist from drowning at Boulter’s Lock, near London. And in 1886 after a canoeist holiday in the United States, he wrote a best seller, ‘The story of Metlakahtla’, which was based on the mission of his friend, Father William Duncan, to the Metlakahtla Indian tribe, and he gave all the profits to Duncan’s Indian funds.
Following a visit in 1901 to the Sudan after Lord Kitchener’s defeat of the dervishes, where he saw the plight of the natives among whom malaria was rife, he was quick to ease their misery caused by the mosquito pest. He established the Wellcome tropical research laboratories at the Gordon memorial college in Khartoum. A floating laboratory to serve the upper Nile was launched, and soon Khartoum became one of the healthiest cities in Africa.
Henry Wellcome personally determined the design of the unicorn, a symbol of healing, which he registered in 1908 as the trademark of Burroughs Wellcome.
In 1910, after being asked by the US Secretary of War to inspect the sanitary conditions of the Panama canal zone, he travelled through the reeking swamps. The report he made on his observations raised money for remedial work to be done. Later that year, he led an archaeological expedition to Jebel Moya, a range of granite hills in the Sudan, between the Blue and White Nile, directing from his tent a constantly increasing army of native diggers.
That same year, Henry Solomon Wellcome became a British subject.
In 1913 Wellcome exhibited many of his medical books and relics of his enormous and unique collection at the XVII International Congress of Medicine. From the success of this he was encouraged to establish the Wellcome historical medical museum. He also founded in 1913 the Wellcome bureau of scientific research in London and put the services of the bureau and staff at the disposal of the British Government during the European war. In 1914 he ultimately secured improvements in design and construction of army field ambulances and equipped them with supplies for the British Army.
In 1932, Wellcome was knighted by King George V. Two years later, Sir Henry Wellcome saw the opening of the Wellcome building in Euston Road, close to London university. Built to his own specifications, it housed the Wellcome historical medical museum and library, and the Wellcome museum of medical science which he also founded in 1914 as a teaching aid at postgraduate level. The Wellcome laboratories of tropical medicine, which were on the upper floors in 1934 were moved in 1965 to a site next to the Wellcome research laboratories at Beckenham, Kent.
Sir Henry Wellcome died in London on July 26, 1936, at nearly 83 years old. He left an estate of just over £3m and the ownership of his business to the Wellcome trust, a registered charity which was to distribute all dividends received from the business to the support of medical and allied research, to include travel grants, veterinary research and tropical medical research.
Since then there have been several business take-overs. When Wellcome became Glaxo Wellcome, making it the world’s biggest drug company with sales of £7.5bn, it was accepted that Wellcome’s 115 years of independence were over. Now, Glaxo Wellcome is to merge with Smithkline Beecham.
Marjorie Stilling is freelance writer from Exmouth, Devon, who once worked in a community pharmacy