The University's College of Pharmacy, now celebrating its 100th anniversary year, was the first in the nation to offer a full-time university program in pharmacy. The leadership role it adopted in 1876 represents a landmark in American pharmaceutical education and practice and resulted in the transformation of a craft into a respected profession.
This century of progress will be saluted by the college and some 1,000 of its alumni October 7-9, during a Centennial weekend on the U-M campus.
The majority of these pharmacists are no longer involved in the preparation and compounding of drugs. Their professional role now more often concerns the distribution and control of medicinal agents — advising both patients and other health care professionals on the complex actions and interactions within the body of modern medications, which are becoming increasingly more powerful and diverse.
This modern role represents an exponential upgrading from 100 years ago when American pharmacists, then commonly called apothecaries or druggists, were generally deplored for their ignorance by the scientific community.
"Our country has been deluged with incompetent drug clerks," reported the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1854. "These clerks in turn become principals and have the direction of others, alas!" Only a few in the profession, notably William Proctor, Jr., and John Maisch, attained excellence in the art and science of preparing and compounding drugs.
Such was not the case in Italy, France and Germany, where pharmacy had had a long tradition and pharmacists were highly esteemed. The Italian pharmacist was always a patrician.
The example set by Europe played a significant part in the introduction of pharmacy into the scientific curriculum at the University of Michigan. According to Glenn Sonnedecker, a University of Wisconsin historian of pharmacy, "the University (of Michigan) had made great strides under its aggressive president, Henry P. Tappan, whose guiding star was European academic thought and the German university in particular. His successor, E. O. Haven, took special pride in his science courses, and during his regime set up new courses in chemistry and physics as well as pharmacy."
The first classes in pharmacy were given in the U-M chemistry department in 1860. Nine years later, in 1869, degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry, the first in the nation, were granted to 23 students, 13 of whom were medical students.
Such was the growth of interest in pharmacy that the Regents set up a separate School of Pharmacy in 1876. (Its name was changed to College of Pharmacy in 1915.) Albert Prescott, head of the chemistry department and the pharmacy curriculum, was appointed its first dean and was to serve as such for 29 years. Prescott was both a physician and chemist and became widely known for his textbook, Qualitative Chemical Analysis, written together with Prof. Silas Douglass, his predecessor as head of chemistry.
One of the distinctions of the new school was its chemical laboratory, a one-story structure constructed in 1855. It was the first chemistry laboratory in a state university. Victor Vaughan, dean of the U-M Medical School from 1891 to 1921, described it in his memoirs as "then the largest and best equipped chemical laboratory in the United States, and with but one in the world to compare with it — the laboratory of Fresenius at Wiesbaden."
The curriculum of the new school, to be completed in one and a half to two years, laid heavy emphasis on basic science and laboratory work. It represented a radical departure from the training then available to apothecaries, comprised of a year or two of apprenticeship in a shop and perhaps some evening classes sponsored by the profession.
The U-M curriculum did not include service in an apothecary's shop. This innovation aroused the opposition of the American Pharmaceutical Association, which refused to recognize the U-M school as a proper "college of pharmacy" on the grounds that, regardless of the amount of training in the basic sciences, graduates could not be recognized as pharmacists without practical experience.
At a meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1871, Dean Prescott defended the U-M curriculum by arguing that store or shop experience was of dubious value since "in a large number of instances, the apprentice is led to perform mechanical labor in blind ignorance of the nature of the material with which he deals . . . and too often he finally ceases to wonder why he does this or that."
His learning was hampered by a teacher, the shop pharmacist, who "has little more science than his apprentice. He also was a blind apprentice if he was an apprentice at all." Under these conditions, Prescott said, the best practical experience was to be found not in the shop but in the university laboratory.
Still, the Association refused admission to Prescott as a delegate representing the U-M curriculum.
But the example of the U-M spread to other universities. In 1883 the University of Wisconsin established a department of pharmacy. Indiana, Ohio and Illinois and others joined in swift succession.
Meanwhile, Dean Prescott was elected vice-president of the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1885 and president in 1899. In 1895, the college braved ridicule and opposition by introducing a four-year bachelor of science degree program to supplement the two-year program, thus bringing pharmacy on a par with other University programs. Further expansions of the curriculum in the following years included the introduction in 1913 of graduate programs leading to the master's degree and the doctor of philosophy degree, the lengthening of the bachelor's program to five years in 1960, and the introduction of a six-year doctor of pharmacy program (Pharm.D.).
The college has grown from seven professors in 1875 to 22 in 1975, and from an enrollment of 29 men in 1869 to a current yearly enrollment of nearly 600, over half of whom are women.
Affirmative action had an early start at the college. The sisters Amelia and Mary Upjohn, daughters of the founder of the Upjohn Company, graduated in pharmacy in June 1871, just three months after the first two women to receive degrees at the University.
Other notable graduates of the U-M College of Pharmacy include Josiah K. Lilly, grandson of the founder of the Eli Lilly Company; John G. Searle, grandson of the founder of G. D. Searle; Charles R. Walgreen, Jr., and Charles R. Walgreen III, son and grandson of the founder of the Walgreen chain of drugstores; and Gregory Peck, Sr., father of the actor.
While these distinguished graduates were receiving their education here, dramatic changes in both the practice and technology of pharmacy were under way.
A hundred years ago, according to a pharmaceutical historian, "Patent medicines containing opium dominated the American drug market. Babies were actually turned into addicts by these 'soothing syrups'." American druggists were flooding the market with "inferior and sophisticated (misrepresented)" drugs not always out of profit-seeking but out of ignorance. Without a knowledge of pharmaceutical analysis, they were easy prey to dishonest wholesalers.
Pharmaceutical analysis is only one of the many areas now studied at the U-M. Other areas include pharmaceutics (physico-chemical properties of dosage forms), pharmacognosy (discovering plants with drug properties), pharmacokinetics (diffusion and absorption processes of drugs), medicinal chemistry (with emphasis on synthesis of drugs), nuclear pharmacy (manufacture and use of radio-pharmaceuticals), clinical pharmacy, and pharmacy administration.
Pharmaceutical companies have taken over most of the manufacturing functions of the neighborhood druggist. Graduates of the college now fill posts not only in the neighborhood pharmacy but in industrial and hospital pharmacies, in pharmaceutical companies, in colleges and in government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, Drug Enforcement Agency, Veterans Administration, and the Public Health Service.
Still, nearly 25 percent of the baccalaureate graduates of the college become community pharmacists while another 25 percent be come hospital pharmacists.
In light of the fact that the druggist's role as dispenser of and adviser on drugs is more important than ever before, the U-M College of Pharmacy performed no small service to public health when it broke away from traditional pharmaceutical education in 1876.
The Michigan Alumnus
September 1976, page 15
