The British market for medicine in the late nineteenth century: the innovative impact of S M Burroughs & Co.

Historians of medicine have tended to be preoccupied primarily with scientific research, the development of therapeutically significant medicines, and ethical business practice. Roy Porter, however, adopted a wider conception. Referring to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, he redefined the role of “the vile race of quacks” (so described by their own contemporaries1) as a manifestation of a burgeoning medical entrepreneurship in an emerging consumer society.2 He maintained that “Irregular medicine … mobilised the growth of medicine as business”,3 an aspect of medical history which he believed to have been largely ignored hitherto and one which requires of historians an understanding of the market for pharmaceuticals.4 Anne Digby has examined the market for medical services during the nineteenth century in an analysis of interactions between doctors and patients at a time when self-dosing was prevalent.5 However, interactions between medical practitioners and suppliers of medicines in Britain for most of this period remain largely unexplored (with the significant exception of the work by Jonathan Liebenau6) and as a result, it will be argued, have been misunderstood. This article examines pharmaceutical products and marketing innovations in the late nineteenth century and explores the ensuing transition in the relations between medical practitioners and suppliers of medicine. Such developments are set against the contextual themes of progress in medical science and the treatment of illness in the period. A perceived conjuncture between changing marketing methods and the development of a science-based pharmaceutical industry in Britain led Liebenau to conclude that increasing scientific complexity explained marketing innovation. He believed that, from the mid-1890s, the ever more technical and scientific character of the new biological therapeutics required the addition of an “educational function” in marketing which would take the form of American style “detail men”, who, in addition to calling on chemists and druggists, visited doctors to explain and promote innovative medicines, preferably employing the appropriate technical and scientific language.7 The introduction of this practice in Britain he attributed to Henry S Wellcome,8 partner in Burroughs Wellcome & Co (BW&Co) from 1880 who, in the mid-1890s, pioneered the development and production of anti-toxins in Britain.9 Liebenau's strong association between science and technology and the marketing of medicine is plausible as a rational narrative. However, subsequent research into the development of the market for medicine in relation to medical reform, the nature of medical science in the nineteenth century, and the history of the predecessor company of S M Burroughs & Co (SMB&Co) suggests that the interpretation is open to question. Placed within the emergence of the contemporary market for medicine, the test conducted here focuses on the contributions made by Silas Burroughs and the enterprise he established after moving from Philadelphia to London in 1878. Historians have concentrated on their successors, Henry Wellcome and BW&Co, probably because from 1895 Wellcome was the sole surviving partner of the latter company until his death in 1936. The significance of Silas Burroughs's predecessor company, however, lies not in historians' neglect of its brief existence, but in the important contribution Burroughs made in establishing innovative marketing foundations for a modern pharmaceutical industry in Britain. Within months of BW&Co's trading in Britain, the Medical Press and Circular had praised the company's success in introducing innovative American products through a novel approach to marketing drugs.10 On the opening of a large factory at Dartford in 1888, the firm of BW&Co was referred to by a reporter in the Chemist and Druggist as “an exponent of modern pharmacy”, which, through distinctive advertising and promotion had created “an entirely new class of business” and established a “world-wide reputation … within the last ten years”.11 Significantly, the reference to “ten years” included the period when SMB&Co was in business. The other justification for examining the company's history is that it provides evidence against which Liebenau's interpretation of the relationship between medicine and marketing during the late nineteenth century can be tested.