Medicine: Drug Man

Pharmacologists, pharmacists and plain drug store clerks came to attention last week when Sir Henry Hallett Dale, director of London’s National Institute for Medical Research and English dean of his profession, reached Manhattan. He was escorted first to Baltimore, to earn a $1,000 stipend for delivering three memorial lectures, then to Rahway. N. J. to salute the opening of Merck & Co. Inc.’s new chemical research laboratory. Drug men were agog to see and hear him.

In Johns Hopkins’ deep, steep Hurd Memorial amphitheatre Sir Henry talked on “Progress in Autopharmacology.” Notable in the audience was aging Dr. Alfred Robert Louis Dohme, 66, pharmaceutical chemist whose mother established the fund which brought Sir Henry to Baltimore in her husband’s memory.*

Few of the audience understood more than the gist of Sir Henry’s discourse. He stood behind a lectern in the amphitheatre’s pit, tall, domed and ruddy, looking like a vicar in a pulpit, and in a rich baritone spoke at length about the drugs which the body creates within itself. The hormones are among such drugs. Histamine and acetycholine are two subtle auto-pharmacals with which he dealt particularly. Histamine seems to be a generalized component of body tissues. Lung cells are richest with it, epidermal cells next richest. At every injury or irritation the insulted cells exude their histamine. The histamine dilates the blood vessels in the neighborhood and at once initiates healing. To illustrate, Sir Henry scratched his hand with a fingernail, exhibited the red weal which quickly rose.

Acetycholine, which lies hidden in the large arteries, the large and small intestines and the placenta, behaves like histamine, but is chemically different. Despite intense research the origins of both remain obscure.

When Sir Henry finished he commented : “We do not have knowledge as to the therapeutical or pharmaceutical value of these researches. In the end they may throw light on causes rather than provide materials.” [Applause.’] Cried Professor Warfield Theobald Longcope, Sir Henry’s Baltimore host: “Exciting!”

At Merck & Co.’s new Rahway research plant, diffident young President George Wilhelm Merck, a Harvardman who lives on a farm outside West Orange and considers himself very unimportant (except for chairmanning the New Jersey section of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment’). did the honors. Sir Henry & suite swept through the huge, roomy U-shaped brick structure, beamed at Director Randolph Thomas Major, saluted Director Hans Molitor whose philanthropic Merck Institute of Therapeutic Research occupies space in the new building. In the U. S., observed the chief visitor, there seems to be more deference paid to pharmacologists connected with educational institutions than to those connected with commercial organizations. In Europe this is not so.

A list of able pharmacologists with commercial institutions would include Merck’s Hans Molitor, Parke, Davis & Co.’s Oliver Kamm, and David Israel Macht who was long at Johns Hopkins, is now with Hynson, Westcott & Dunning of Baltimore. A pharmacist takes chemicals, drugs and herbs, and compounds them so that they cause certain physiological results. The pharmacologist goes in for new fields, searches for substances which will produce desired effects. By these definitions Baltimore’s Alfred Robert Louis Dohme is a top rank pharmacist in the commercial field, Columbia’s Henry Kurd Rusby in the educational category.

Drug manufacturers are multiplied and magnified pharmacists, may be catalogued similarly. There are the manufacturers of fine chemicals, houses which process raw materials like iodides, mercurials, bismuth salts. These are sold to pharmaceutical houses, industrial concerns, wholesale druggists who vend them to corner druggists. In this group are Squibb (vitamins). Merck (iodides, arsenicals), Hoffman-La Roche (hypnotics), Mallinckrodt (io-deikon), Pfizer (citric acid). New York Quinine & Chemical (quinine).

Manufacturers of Pharmaceuticals (they put fine chemicals into pills, capsules, ampules) include notably: Bristol-Myers, Sharpe & Dohme, Parke Davis, Frederick Stearns, McKesson & Robbins. Norwich Pharmacal, Wyeth Chemical, Eli Lilly, Abbott Laboratories.

* In 1931 Dr. Dohme was talked of as Republican candidate for mayor of Baltimore—until citizens remembered that his firm of Sharpe & Dohme absorbed H. K. Mulford Co. of Philadelphia and threw several hundred Baltimoreans out of jobs.