The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 276 No 7385 p111
28 January 2006

This book is more a longish history of pharmacy

‘Making medicines: a brief history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals’, edited by Stuart Anderson. Pp xviii+318. Price £24.95. London: Pharmaceutical Press; 2005. ISBN 0 85369 597 0

The editor’s hope is that ‘Making medicines’ will appeal to pharmacy students, to those who have been qualified for some time, and to a wider, general audience. Had the contents covered what the title suggests, this might have been achieved, although choosing a dozen academics to write the text is hardly the best way to reach a wider readership. With this book it is much a case of caveat emptor, since little of the contents is about making medicines. Even the subtitle, ‘A brief history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals’, is misleading. More accurately the book could be described as a longish history of pharmacy (not, it has to be said, the most riveting of subjects), with a brief résumé — 53 pages out of 299 — of the making of medicines.

The chapter on the development of pharmaceuticals runs to 17 pages of text, an impossible condensation and beyond even the capabilities of Judy Slinn, who has elsewhere written the histories of several pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline. As a result there are glaring omissions. The Distillers Company was the first manufacturer in the UK to produce penicillin, and then streptomycin, by deep vat fermentation. This pioneering endeavour, later adopted as standard practice, does not get a mention here. The discovery of drugs is a hugely interesting field covering many exciting finds — arsphenamine (Salvarsan) by Ehrlich, Prontosil by Domagk, and penicillin by Fleming — but here, in a 20-page chapter by the usually capable Viviane Quirke, these trailblazers get only passing references. Banting and Best, the discoverers of insulin, get the briefest of mentions but are not indexed.

So if students of the history of pharmacy need another book on the subject, in addition to the stalwart volumes of L. G. Matthews and G. E. Trease, and S. W. F. Holloway’s encyclopaedic history of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (‘Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain 1841–1991: a political and social history’), this one, on the history side, is accurate and comprehensive.


Ray Sturgess (a pharmacist and writer from Knaresborough, North Yorkshire)