Post 758 - The Story of Pharmacology in Under 1000 Words

The Story of Pharmacology in Under 1000 Words

 

In  the beginning, anything could be a drug.  Whether it was ground from a plant or found in an animal, it was ingested, applied, or injected by our ancestors.  Eventually, scribes wrote things down to help remember what was beneficial (for use in the community) or poisonous (for use against an enemy).  Priests became physicians, rituals became office calls, and hieroglyphics became prescriptions.  Physicians lost the time to make their own medicines, so they turned the work over to apprentices who became pharmacists.  Throughout the whole evolutionary process, everything worked just fine and everyone became healthier.  Well, not exactly.

In the United States before 1906, if you wanted a drug and you had the money, you could just go out and buy it.  Prescriptions were only a recommended option, and in some states, licensing any health professional was actively discouraged.  

Patent medicines were loaded with morphine, cocaine, cannabis, or mercury compounds (so much so that archaeologists tracing the path of Lewis and Clark could identify fort locations by the levels of mercury still remaining in the explorers’ abandoned latrines).   

Morphine was so widely used during the American Civil War that, after 1865, over 100,000 soldiers had some form of habituation or addiction to the narcotic.   

The demand for drugs, licit and illicit, was sufficient enough for Sears to issue a separate drug catalogue at the start of the 20th century, essentially creating the first mail-order pharmacy.

In response to scandals of patient deaths and addictions, President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.  Considered a radical measure in its time, the act initially could only assure that ingredients and their amounts were listed on a patent medicine label (you could still get “arsenic tabules” for your complexion, but at least you knew it contained arsenic; this was considered a major breakthrough for consumer safety).

Plants served as the primary source for drugs.  The term pharmacognosy, meaning “knowledge of drugs,” essentially meant the knowledge of plants.

Eventually, specific chemicals were discovered, isolated, or synthesized, and the sources for drugs began to shift from plants to the chemist’s bench.  The idea was to create an inexhaustible supply of drugs.  Being able to minimize unexpected responses came from carefully controlling the dose.   

Even with the progression of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Agency into the present-day FDA (its focus becoming foods and drugs), it still had little power to protect consumers.  The fine against a Dr. James Peebles for selling “bitter almonds” (cyanide) as part of a treatment for epilepsy was a mere $5 in 1913.   

It took further health disasters to prompt the creation of safety regulations.  In 1937, deaths from a toxic solvent in the antibiotic sulfanilamide prompted a law requiring new drugs actually be shown safe before marketing (the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938).  Serious birth defects in 1962 linked to thalidomide inspired the Kefauver-Harris amendments to assure that drugs were tested for safety and effectiveness before marketing.

Package inserts for patient information eventually appeared in 1970.

In between these laws came the Durham-Humphrey act, dividing drugs into the categories of non-prescription, prescription, and controlled substances: 

    Controlled substances were those drugs with the potential for addiction or abuse.
    Non-prescription drugs became commonly known as over the counter drugs or OTCs.  
    

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) appeared in the early 1970s;  and, with it, the establishment of controlled substance schedules or categories, ranked by the drug’s potential for abuse.  These categories became schedules I (one) through V (five), and are still in use today:

Pharmacology Today in Under 300 Words

Modern pharmacology is a combined study of anything that can interact with living systems.  It builds upon knowledge of physiology, chemistry, botany, biochemistry, and mathematical theorems.  Even the study of pharmacognosy, after decades of being brushed aside as irrelevant, has reappeared with the increased interest in “herbal” or “natural” therapy...in some ways, we have not journeyed far from the explorers who traveled with Lewis and Clark in 1803.

Post 741 - A Quick Overview of Battle Creek's Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his Influence, ca 1993

Dr. Kellogg had determined that his Biologic Living could take care of any complaint.  He had already decided that quinine was less effective than hydrotherapy for typhoid; so, when the depression hit, he decided to save money by walking into the San's pharmacy and firing the whole department.  Now, in Michigan, there is a law that states if a hospital has more than 25 beds, it is required to have an on-site pharmacist.  So a week or so later, Dr. Kellogg was in the situation of having to replace his pharmacy department.  Most of the staff had found jobs elsewhere, except for one of the technicians, who was still working at the San, but in physical therapy.  Dr. Kellogg tracked him down and put him in charge of the newly reorganized pharmacy department.  I suppose by doing this, you could say he anticipated today's methods of health care management.  By the way, the new employees of the pharmacy were encouraged to use the back entrances of the San.  

Dr. Kellogg made a point of commenting on the contemporary women's fashions of the 19th century.  He was especially disturbed with the use of corsets to get the "hour glass" figure so popular then, and made a point in his world travels of measuring the natural waistlines of the native population.  Constriction of the intestines interrupted the natural flow of things and could lead to autointoxication.  One day he set out to demonstrate this with an experiment on his wife's collie, fitting the dog with a patient's corset.  The dog had other ideas and took off.  Kellogg followed on his bicycle but the dog made it home first, still partially wearing the corset.  There is no documentation of the conversation that followed between the doctor and his wife, just as there is no record of how the doctor coaxed one of his patient's from her corset.

In the end, he was a man of contradictions.  While telling us we needed to relax, he worked upwards of 20 hours a day.  He wanted us to eat properly, but was erratic in his own diet.  He considered himself a philanthropist, but paid the lowest possible wages to his employees.  He wrote over 50 books, was foster father to over 40 children, performed over 10,000 surgeries, and put Battle Creek on the map before anyone ever heard of corn flakes, yet there is not a single monument, building, or street named for him.  Ultimately, he was a man of ideals and ideas, but a poor businessman who didn't have an effective plan to perpetuate his legacy.  

With George Bernard Shaw, mid 1920s

Post 726 - Better History Via Peanuts - 1959 Version

For a handful of empty Planter's Peanuts wrappers, you could get a coloring book with the US Presidents through Eisenhower, complete with "coloring hints."   I obliterated mine with crayons and used the text through second grade for any "themes" about Presidents that could arise (the library was across the river and our Funk and Wagnall's hadn't been fully purchased from the grocery store at the time).  

However, 40 years later, I found another copy - uncrayoned and mostly intact - at an estate sale, and the text would seem a wee bit biased to the more discerning reader of today.  But, hey, here it is! (Click on image to enlarge).

A later version came out in the 1960s, but it wasn't nearly as colorful and was practically devoid of text.  I didn't make an effort to save it and haven't seen another copy since.

Post 700 - Benjamin Franklin and A Republic - Editorial in Big Rapids Pioneer 20 September 2024

I considered first just making a comment about the essay, but the piece is so well written that I decided to lift it straight from the readers' page of the Big Rapids Pioneer.  That it needs to be said, in a region of Michigan where the erosion of civility and intellect is at times stunning, emphasizes the concurrent erosion of who we are as a nation -- and what it means to exist as a supportive society.  End of soapbox.  

If you wish to subscribe to this long-running local paper, a stepping stone for aspiring journalists in the area, consider a visit to https://www.bigrapidsnews.com/

Post 656 - One-Room Schoolhouses in Calhoun County - Slide Show from 2011

 Designed for elementary schools in Calhoun County, when local history was an actual subject thereon.

I had designed "BC Black Squirrel" in 2008, featured him in a mini-documentary about the area's "Mill Race" the following year, and then did some incidental sketches for this presentation, along with some "historic recreations" of school life of the 19th century.  

I am not sure how much use is it currently getting around that area these days, and only recently did I see a copy of this particular handout, ca 2011.  I thought the sketches I provided had never been put to use!