Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
5 - Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
broadly this contribution is concerned with drug regulation in Germany during 1871–1914, in particular with the interaction of the government and the chemical industry in this area. From its beginning the German chemical industry was not a uniformly organized industrial branch. Since the 1850s and 1860s, it was possible to differentiate between the heavy chemicals (primary) industry and the preparations (processing) industry. Whereas the interest and problems of the first lay in the production of soda, sulphuric acid, potash, and fertilizers (in conjunction with the rising coal and steel industries), the second pursued its own interests and as such was the first to come into contact with governmental health institutions. This distinct attitude of the preparations industry is further underlined by the founding of a body, in 1877, called the Verein zur Wahrung der Interessen der chemischen Industrie (Association for Safeguarding the Interests of the Chemical Industry).
Analysing the health policy of the Empire, our main interest will be the preparations industry. Its products fall into two large groups, coal tar chemicals and fine chemicals – both are closely connected with the pharmacy. The pharmacists, in Germany traditionally having the privilege of preparing medicines, developed also an interest in fine chemicals. The mid-nineteenth-century industrialization brought forth such firms emerging from pharmacists' shops as Schering, Riedel, and Merck. Since the 1880s the dye manufacturers began to develop medicines from waste products or by-products.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drugs and Narcotics in History , pp. 97 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995