MO Pharmacist August 2022

Now&Then

W by BOB PRIDDY Thomas W. Dyott: The Original Big Pharma We see it in agriculture — A company develops the seeds, regulates who can use them, takes the resulting crop, runs it through company-owned processing, and markets the resulting product. It also works in the pork and poultry industries. It’s called “vertical integration” and is the basis of Cor porate Farming. We might think of Thomas W. Dyott as the creator of Corporate Pharming . He was an almost penniless former Lon don apothecary’s apprentice who showed up in Philadelphia in the early 1800s and created America’s first Patent Medicine Empire—a one man Big Pharma, if you will. Dyott arrived about 1805 (some say earlier) and rented a room where he created the first boot-blacking business in the city. He polished footwear by day and at night, in the basement, manufactured the shoeblack to be used the next day. His business soon was selling his boot-blacking substance in bottles. He realized he couldmakemoremoney by He claimed “Dr. Robertson” was his grand father, a prominent physician in Edinburgh, Scotland.The later revelation by a Philadelphia medical journal that there was had been no “Dr. Robertson” in Edinburgh for a good 200 years had no impact on his growing business. Before long, Thomas W. Dyott was run ning the largest patent medicine business in the United States. The centennial history of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1922 called him “the most audacious and industri ous distributor of secret medicines in Philadel phia…No one in the city, no one in the United States, carried on so considerable a business in panaceas.” The War of 1812 cut supplies of bottles fromBritain, forcing Dyott to look to domestic producers. He bought an interest in the Olive GlassWorks inGlassboro, NJ, and soon became an agent for two other New Jersey glass works, giving him dominance of the industry in the Philadelphia region. In 1833 he added the Kensington Glass Portrait of Thomas W. Dyott ca. 1836 by JohnNeagle (1796-1865) AndrewMellon Collection, National Gallery of Art.

using knowledge gained in London, perhaps in cluding some of the nostrum recipes he brought with him, to capitalize on the rapidly-growing American demand for cures and became a part of an industry growing so rapidly that The New York Daily Advertiser had commented in 1800, “The vendors of patent medicines in almost every capital town in the United States are fattening on the weakness and folly of a deluded public.” Dyott opened a drugstore in 1807 and three years later added the letters “M.D.” to his name for no legitimate reason, claiming “extensive experience” in the West Indies and London before arriving in Philadelphia. He de scribed his enterprise as a “Medical dispensary and proprietor of Robertson’s familymedicines prepared by T. W. Dyott.”

Works in Philadelphia, which had supplied bot tles for his bootblack mixture and his medi cines, and turned it into a business that supplied bottles for himself as well as his competitors. By the 1830s the Glass Works of T. W. Dyott covered 400 acres and had about 400 employees including apprentices six to seventeen years old. “He was an agent for several glass manu facturers …made bottles in Kensington, dealt in garden seeds, paints, dyer’s supplies, chemi cal and pharmaceutical apparatus, butter pots, snuff, chewing tobacco, mustard, chocolate, lard, ham, brandy, sugar plums, and cowskin whips … What he could not sell he would barter for rosin, turpentine, lamp black, beeswax, cheese, rye and apple whisky, peach brandy, pearl ash, flax seed, bristles, rags, logwood, mackerel, shad,

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