² Am Ende was widely credited with the invention of absorbent cotton and having, as one physician put it, “more to do with the success of antiseptic surgery than any person in the country, except the surgeons themselves”; Medical News, Jan. 16, 1886, 82. For details of the case, see New York Times, Sept. 1, 2, 4, 1885, Jan. 6, July 4, 1886; Chicago Tribune, Sept. 2, 1885; Washington Post, Sept. 1, 1885, July 5, 1886.

³ Rhode Island passed what was probably the first comprehensive pharmacy law in 1870. It restricted the practice of retailing, compounding, or dispensing “medicines or poisons” to registered pharmacists or their employees. It also instituted educational requirements, established an examination system for acquiring a license, established a schedule of dangerous substances, prohibited the adulteration of drugs or medicines, and mandated that any bottle, box, or other container in which dangerous substances were sold had to be clearly labeled with the word “poison.” Over the next decade, seven states and the District of Columbia followed suit. Twenty-two more states and territories added comprehensive pharmacy laws in the 1880s, and twelve more in the 1890s. For a chronological list, see Sonnedecker, Glenn, rev., Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy (Madison, 1976), 381–82.Google Scholar For the Rhode Island Act, see General Statutes of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (1872), 253–56.Google Scholar For an example of a law prohibiting the use of drugs to induce abortion, see Revised Statutes of the State of Illinois (1887), 427. For a law that prohibited the sale of intoxicating drugs to drunkards and Indians, see General Statutes of the State of Michigan (1882), 602. For a law that prohibited the sale of dangerous drugs to people intent on committing suicide, see Revised Codes of the Territory of the Dakota (1877), 724. The criminalization of opium smoking is dealt with below, but also see, for example, Statutes of the State of Nevada (1885), 47.

⁴ Examples include Lilienfeld, David, “The First Pharmacoepidemilogic Investigations: National Drug Safety Policy in the United States, 1901–1902,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 51 (Spring 2008): 188–98CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; McTavish, Jan R., Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and Its Remedies in America (New Brunswick, 2004), 86–111Google Scholar; Steven Pray, W., A History of Nonpre-scription Product Regulation (New York, 2003), 33–76Google Scholar; Marks, Harry, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990 (New York, 1997), esp. 73–78Google Scholar; Sonnedecker, Glenn, “Drug Standards Become Official” in The Early Years of Federal Food and Drug Control, ed. Young, James Harvey (Madison, 1982), 28–39Google Scholar; Temin, Peter, Taking Your Medicine: Drug Regulation in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 18–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, James Harvey, “Drugs and the 1906 Law” in Safeguarding the Public: Historical Aspects of Medicinal Drug Control, ed. Blake, John B. (Baltimore, 1970), 112–22Google Scholar; Young, James Harvey, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America Before Federal Regulation (Princeton, 1961), 205–262.Google Scholar

⁵ Examples include Courtwright, David, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 2001), esp. 166–86Google Scholar; Spillane, Joseph F., Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore, 2000), 105–63Google Scholar; Bewley-Taylor, David R., The United States and International Drug Control, 1909–1997 (New York, 1999), 16–30Google Scholar; Musto, David, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, 1973).Google Scholar On why it makes sense to treat alcohol and other drugs in similar terms historically, see Tracy, Sarah W. and Acker, Caroline Jean, “Introduction: Psychoactive Drugs—An American Way of Life” in Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000, ed. Tracy, and Acker, (Amherst, MA, 2004), 1–32.Google Scholar The historiography of the temperance movement is obviously immense, but see Tracy, Sarah W., Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition (Baltimore, 2005).Google Scholar

⁶ For the corporate transformation of American society and culture, one can begin with McGovern, Charles, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Livingston, James, Pragmatism, Feminism, Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York, 2001)Google Scholar, and Livingston, , Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; Calder, Lendol, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, 1999)Google Scholar; Jackson Lears, T. J., Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, and Lears, , No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (New York, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968).Google Scholar

⁷ For example, shortly after the tragedy one medical journal noted that “the two cases of death caused by the well-known and highly-esteemed druggist Am Ende have made a good deal of excited discussion as to how such accidents might be avoided. It is with the same view that the State has established a law making a druggist committing such a mistake liable to imprisonment”; “New York,” Medical Times and Register, Sept. 19, 1885, 953.

⁸ Garro, Linda C. and Mattingly, Cheryl, “Narrative as Construct and Construction” in Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, ed. Mattingly, Cheryl and Garro, Linda C. (Berkeley, 2000), 1.Google Scholar

⁹ Robbins, Daniel C., “The Drug Business: Its Relation to Medication and Pharmacy,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1872): 409–18.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Sonnedecker, , Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy, 330.Google Scholar

¹¹ The growth of the pharmaceutical industry during this period is an understudied area, but see Liebenau, Jonathan, Medical Science and Medical Industry: The Formation of the American Pharmaceutical Industry (Baltimore, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haynes, William, American Chemical Industry, vol. 6, The Chemical Companies (New York, 1954).Google Scholar On Parke, Davis & Company, see Gabriel, Joseph M., “A Thing Patented is a Thing Divulged: Francis E. Stewart, George S. Davis, and the Legitimization of Intellectual Property Rights in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64 (Apr. 2009): 135–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoefle, Milton L., “The Early History of Parke-Davis and Company,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, 25 (2000): 28–34Google Scholar; Spillane, , Cocaine, 58–73, 132–34Google Scholar; Farmer, Silas, The History of Detroit and Michigan; or The Metropolis Illustrated (Detroit, 1889), 818–21.Google Scholar

¹² Between 1867 and 1886, imports of quinine coming through New York increased from about 22,100 ounces to more than 1,122,100 ounces; licorice root, from just over three million pounds to more than 48 million pounds; crude camphor, from 257,500 pounds to over 861,500 pounds; and so on. See “Appendix to the Report of the Committee on the Drug Market,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1867): 290–93; and “Report on the Drug Market” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1886): 2–3.

¹³ The total manufacturing output of drugs, toilet items, and household preparations more than tripled from 37.7 million in 1867 to 136 million in 1900 (or double the rate of population growth, which went from 38 million to 76 million). Shaw, William Howard, Value of Commodity Output since 1869 (Washington, 1947), 30–52Google Scholar, repr. in Historical Statistics of the United States (New York, 2000).

¹⁴ Hoefle, , “The Early History of Parke-Davis,” 30Google Scholar; Gabriel, “A Thing Patented Is a Thing Divulged”; Bender, George, “Searching the Southwest for Medicines,” Journal of Arizona History (Summer 1983): 103–18.Google ScholarPubMed For an account of an expedition to South America sponsored by the company during this period, see Rusby, Henry Hurd, Jungle Memories (New York, 1933).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁶ Courtwright, , Dark Paradise, 25Google Scholar; “Report of the Committee on the Drug Market,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1872): 393–93; “Report of the Committee on the Drug Market,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1886): 8.

¹⁷ Analysis of census data by Matthew Sobek puts the number of practicing pharmacists in 1870 at 18,800 and in 1900 at 50,100. Sobek, , “New Statistics on the U.S. Labor Force, 1850–1990,” Historical Methods 34 (Spring 2001): 83, Table A1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ “How It Was Done; and How It Can be Done,” Pharmaceutical Record, June 1, 1883, front page.

¹⁹ “The Pharmacists' Trouble,” Pharmaceutical Record, Mar. 1, 1884, 98.

²⁰ “The Retail Drug Trade at Home and Abroad,” Pharmaceutical Record, Nov. 1, 1883, front page. The issue of overproduction has attracted a significant amount of attention from historians: Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution; Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism; Rosenberg, Emily, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion (New York, 1982).Google Scholar For counterarguments, see Becker, William H., The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry and Exports, 1893–1921 (Chicago, 1982).Google Scholar Most historians argue that the problem of overproduction, if there was one, began in the 1890s. Whether or not there was actually a crisis of overproduction in pharmaceuticals during the 1870s and 1880s, there certainly was the perception of one.

²¹ “Editorial,” American Druggist, July 1, 1885, 130.

²² According to Kremers and Urdang, the exceptions were Wyoming and Nevada, which did not organize state pharmaceutical associations until 1915 and 1932, respectively. Utah, which became a state in 1896, organized a pharmaceutical association in 1892; New Mexico, which did not become a state until 1912, formed an organization in 1893. Sonnedecker, , Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy, 379–80.Google Scholar

²³ Quoted in Sonnedecker, , Kremers and Urdang's History of Pharmacy, 196.Google Scholar

²⁴ Kline, M. N., “Report of the Committee on the Drug Market,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Philadelphia, 1886), 361–62.Google Scholar In addition to restrictive legislation, retail pharmacists and manufacturers also worked together to establish price control mechanisms over their wares through voluntary regulatory schemes. One such effort was the so-called “Rebate Plan,” introduced in the early 1880s, whereby manufacturers would pay retailers a certain percentage on all items sold, provided that there had been no complaints filed against them in terms of price cutting. In another scheme, representatives from industry groups fielded complaints of price cutting; once the complaint was authenticated, the manufacturer whose goods were being undersold would issue circulars to wholesale dealers asking them to refrain from supplying the goods in question to the offending merchant until he promised to restore the retail price. For details, see “The Rebate Plan,” Pharmaceutical Record, May 1, 1883, front page; “The Coming Relief,” Pharmaceutical Record, Mar. 1, 1884, 99.

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²⁶ For example, one member of a prominent company argued that “no firm could live that would sell only strictly pure drugs.” Quoted in Cowdrey, Robert H., “Who is Responsible for Adulteration?” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Philadelphia, 1884), 363.Google Scholar

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³⁸ “Increase of a Dangerous Vice,” New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1878.

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⁴¹ For example, Tomes, Nancy, “The Great American Medicine Show Revisited,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Winter 2005): 627–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Tomes, , “Merchants of Health: Medicine and Consumer Culture in the United States, 1900–1940,” Journal of American History 88 (Sept. 2001): 519–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perkins, Barbara Bridgman, The Medical Delivery Business: Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar; Wailoo, Keith, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 1997), esp. 99–133Google Scholar; Apple, Rima Dombrow, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996).Google Scholar This trend in the historiography stands in contrast to Paul Starr's claim that medicine “escaped” the corporation during this period; see Starr, , The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York, 1982), 198–232.Google Scholar

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⁴³ Squibb, Edward R., “Notes on Chloral,” Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Philadelphia, 1872), 543–44.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Corwin, T. L., “Has the Pharmacist the Moral Right to Sell Opiates Indiscriminately Even If He Complies with Any Existing Laws as to Its Registration?” Pharmaceutical Record, July 1885, 204.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ “Editorial,” American Journal of Pharmacy, Jan. 1880, 58.

⁴⁶ Ahmad, Diana L., The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West (Reno, N V, 2007)Google Scholar; Shah, Nyan, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley, 2001), 90–97.Google Scholar On the growth of anti-Chinese sentiment, see Salyer, Lucy E., Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, 1995)Google Scholar; Saxton, Alexander, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1975).Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ Laws of the State of New York (1882), 205. On August 18, 1882, for example, a Chinese man named Ah Chung was arrested for operating an opium den on Pell Street. He was released with a suspended sentence after he agreed to abandon the business. On the same day, seven Chinese men were arrested in an opium den on East Broadway. Three days later, the den was raided again and “13 ecstatic Celestials were suddenly hauled down from the seventh heaven to a police station”; New York Tribune, Aug. 19, 1882. New York Times, Aug. 18, 21 (quotation), 1882.

⁵⁰ “The Opium War: How Young American Girls Are Being Perverted in Chinese Opium ‘Joints,’” National Police Gazette, June 2, 1883, 6.

⁵¹ On this topic, see Hickman, Timothy Alton, Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870–1920 (Amherst, MA, 2007).Google Scholar For an introduction to the contemporary debate over whether habitual drug use should be understood as a disease or a choice, see Reinarman, Craig, “Addiction as Accomplishment: The Discursive Construction of Disease,” Addiction Research and Theory 13 (Aug. 2005): 307–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵³ Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Philadelphia, 1901), 464.

⁵⁴ Atlanta Constitution (April 21, 1901). Local authorities also pursued prosecutions under the state anti-adulteration law. An account of such prosecutions can be found in Atlanta Constitution, June 27, 1901. On the concern over southern black men using cocaine during this period, see Hickman, , Secret Leprosy of Modern Days, 72–80Google Scholar; Cohen, Michael M., “Jim Crow's Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition,” Southern Cultures 12 (Fall 2006): 55–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spillane, , Cocaine, 119–21Google Scholar; Carstairs, Catherine, “‘The Most Dangerous Drug’: Images of African-Americans and Cocaine Use in the Progressive Era,” Left History 7 (Spring 2000): 46–61Google Scholar; Courtwright, David, “The Hidden Epidemic: Opiate Addiction and Cocaine in the South, 1860–1920,” Journal of Southern History 49 (Feb. 1983): 69–71Google ScholarPubMed; Musto, , The American Disease, 5–8.Google Scholar

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⁵⁶ Discussions of the “social self” include Gabriel, Joseph M., “Mass-Producing the Individual: Mary C. Jarrett, Elmer E. Southard, and the Industrial Origins of Psychiatric Social Work,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (Fall 2005): 420–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklansky, Jeffrey, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar; Alkana, Joseph, The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Lexington, K Y, 1997)Google Scholar; Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution; McClay, Wilfred M., The Masterless: Self and Society in America (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; Cohen, Marshall, Charles Horton Cooley and the Social Self in American Thought (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Chicago, 1977).Google Scholar

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