Heroes of Pharmacy: Professional Leadership in Times of Change (review)

The distinguished historian of pharmacy, Dennis B. Worthen, has performed a great service to pharmacists and the public by illuminating pharmacy’s proud heritage as an integral part of the American experience. This time he has produced a wonderful book that is a treasure trove of biographical portraits about the dreamers and doers who shaped American pharmacy. Readers of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association will recognize the twenty-eight biographies from the Heroes of Pharmacy series that has appeared regularly since 2002. Having the biographies located in a single volume allows the reader to juxtapose each individual’s vision and contribution to pharmacy as it evolved from an era of apprentices in small shops to today’s clinical specialists with graduate degrees, a transition that occurred in less than 233 years. The featured biographies average about seven pages and provide information about the subject’s family, personal life, and education, but their main focus is to highlight the subject’s contributions toward advancing pharmacy. The biographies that appear in alphabetical order are meticulously researched, relying on a variety of innovative and often unpublished sources including university and association memoranda, speeches, and manuscripts. Anyone who has attempted to write about pharmacists can appreciate the degree of difficulty, resourcefulness, and persistence needed to produce the richly detailed portraits that the author offers.

In the introduction the author explains his methodology for selecting the subjects featured in the book and then offers a brief collective picture of what his subjects shared in common as a group. The twenty-eight pharmacists featured form a human kaleidoscope of individuals from various backgrounds with new ideas that helped advance pharmacy’s quest to be recognized as a profession. They all took professional risks and often spoke out against the conventional wisdom of their respective eras in order to act as agents of change to realize their visions for pharmacy’s future. The controversies and debates their ideas initiated have for the most part come to fruition in the pharmacy world today, but the pioneers who made them all too often go unappreciated. These pharmacy pioneers worked diligently to transform education, community and institutional practice, government, industry, the military, in addition to pharmacy organizations and associations. The majority of the subjects featured in the book (twenty-one to be exact) came from two eras that were significant in the shaping of modern American pharmacy, 1850–1900 and 1900–50. Of course, one of the landmark events in pharmacy’s history was the founding of the American Pharmaceutical Association in Philadelphia in 1852. The author opens the book with a brief overview of the APhA’s founding and offers paragraph length biographies highlighting the main achievements of each founder. Two of the founders, William Procter Jr. and Edward Parrish, are more fully profiled later in the book.

What is striking about these pharmacy pioneers is their ability to take a long view of the world and envision pharmacy’s role in it, especially those involved in education. From Albert Prescott, who helped initiate a university-centered education for pharmacists in the late-nineteenth century, to Donald Francke, who called for didactic education to be combined with clinical practice in the 1960, pharmacy educators were confronting the challenges presented by the complexities of the modern world. Edward Kremers helped create the first graduate degree programs in pharmaceutics at the University of Wisconsin. In an address to the APhA in 1892 Kremers lamented that “In our utilitarian and materialistic age, too little attention is given to history even in the academic courses of our colleges and universities. The professional student should have at least a fair knowledge of the history of his profession” (118). Rufus Lyman, a long-time dean at the University of Nebraska and founding editor of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, was a staunch advocate for educating students rather than training them because in the long-term the former would outlast the latter...