99 Fun Facts About Pharmacy

The first recorded pharmacies opened in the 8th century in which Islamic Golden Age city?

Baghdad. Many histories date its first pharmacies to 754, but the city was only founded in 762.

Which emperor's decree, issued around 1240, formally separated the professions of physician and apothecary?

Frederick II. The Holy Roman Emperor's edict barred physicians from selling their own drugs and put both professions under official regulation.

Which city's Town Hall Pharmacy has traded from the same building since at least 1422?

Tallinn. The Raeapteek has long sold more than remedies: marzipan and claret wine go over the same counter as the medicines.

The pharmacy often called the world's oldest, begun by Dominican friars at Santa Maria Novella, is in which city?

Florence. Its oldest scent, Acqua della Regina, is traditionally dated to 1533, made for Catherine de' Medici to carry to France as a bride.

Which Greek physician wrote the five-volume De Materia Medica, describing some 600 medicinal plants?

Dioscorides. Travelling as a surgeon with Nero's armies let him study plants across the Roman world, and his book stayed the leading drug text for more than 1,500 years.

The Ebers Papyrus, ancient Egypt's great scroll of remedies, is named after whom?

Its German buyer. Georg Ebers, an Egyptologist who also wrote popular novels, purchased the scroll at Thebes in the 1870s and took it home to Leipzig.

The prescription symbol Rx comes from the Latin word 'recipe', meaning what?

Medieval prescriptions began with the physician telling the apothecary to 'take' certain materials and compound them.

A show globe, the coloured-liquid glass vessel once displayed by druggists, served much the same purpose as what?

A barber's pole. Both signs guided customers who could not read; one story says London apothecaries set coloured globes in their windows in the 1665 plague to show they had stayed when doctors fled.

Which Romantic poet qualified as an apothecary in 1816 but gave up medicine to write verse?

John Keats. He trained under a surgeon and assisted at operations at Guy's Hospital, yet never practised: within months of qualifying he told his guardian he would be a poet.

Aspirin's precursor, salicin, comes from the bark of which tree?

Willow. In 1763 the English clergyman Edward Stone ran one of the first clinical trials, treating fever patients with powdered willow bark.

Which German company first produced pure acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 and named it Aspirin?

Bayer. In World War I the United States seized the firm's American arm and auctioned it off, trademarks included, and Bayer had to buy its own name back decades later.

Doctors avoid giving aspirin to children with viral infections because of the risk of which condition?

Reye syndrome. The rare illness attacks the brain and liver; after doctors stopped giving children aspirin in the 1980s, cases fell by more than 90%.

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by which Scottish physician?

Alexander Fleming. Back from a summer holiday, he found mould growing on a dish of bacteria he had left out, with a clear ring around it where the germs had died.

The mould strain that made wartime mass production of penicillin possible was found on which fruit at a Peoria market?

A cantaloupe. Its mould far out-produced the original 1928 strain and became the parent of every strain used commercially; who carried the melon in was never settled.

Insulin was first isolated in 1921 by Banting and Best in the Toronto laboratory of which professor?

John Macleod. On learning he had to share the 1923 Nobel Prize with Macleod, Banting gave half his money to Best, and Macleod then gave half of his to Collip.

For how much did insulin's discoverers sell their patent to the University of Toronto in 1923?

$1. The team thought patenting a medicine unethical, so they took one out only to stop anyone else monopolising insulin, then handed it over for a token dollar.

Which painkiller did Friedrich Sertürner isolate from opium and name after the god of dreams?

Morphine. The German pharmacist chose the name for its power to bring on sleep, calling his new crystals morphium after Morpheus.

Quinine, the malaria drug, was first isolated in 1820 from the bark of which tree?

Cinchona. By tradition, British officials in the tropics made their bitter quinine palatable with sugar, soda and a measure of gin, and the gin and tonic was born.

William Withering's 1785 study of a folk cure for dropsy brought which plant into medicine as a heart drug?

Foxglove. The cure was a Shropshire woman's secret herbal recipe; Withering picked out its one active plant and recorded how easily a dose could turn toxic.

Ibuprofen was discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson while working for which British pharmacy chain?

Boots. Adams had joined the chain as a teenage shop apprentice, and he tried the new drug on his own hangover before giving an important speech.

Paracetamol is known in the United States by which name?

Acetaminophen. Both names are stitched from syllables of the drug's long chemical name, para-acetylaminophenol; Britain and America simply kept different ones.

The 1982 Tylenol murders, in which capsules were laced with cyanide, led directly to what?

Tamper-evident packaging. Tylenol's maker recalled some 31 million bottles and relaunched with foil seals, and in 1983 Congress made tampering with products a federal crime.

Thalidomide, already on sale in dozens of countries, was kept off the US market by which FDA reviewer?

Frances Oldham Kelsey. Handed the file as one of her first assignments, she refused approval for over a year despite constant pressure from the maker, and President Kennedy decorated her.

Thalidomide won US approval in 2006 as a treatment for which cancer?

Multiple myeloma. The drug that harmed more than 10,000 babies came back under strict rules, with patients checked to make sure they are not pregnant while taking it.

Which 1937 tragedy, caused by a medicine made with a toxic solvent, prompted the US Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act?

The Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster. More than 100 people died, many of them children, yet the maker had skipped no required safety test, because the law then demanded none.

Which US president signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, the 'Wiley Act', in 1906?

Theodore Roosevelt. The final push came from Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, whose nauseating picture of the meat-packing industry also forced through a meat inspection law.

The word 'placebo' is Latin for what?

I shall please. Doctors first used the word for a remedy 'given more to please than to benefit the patient', long before anyone spoke of a placebo effect.

A generic drug may go on sale once what happens to a brand-name medicine?

Its patents expire. Copies need not repeat the animal and human trials the original went through, and several rivals often arrive together, which is why generics sell for so much less.

Compounding pharmacies exist to do what?

Prepare custom medications for individuals. A child who can't swallow a tablet may get the same drug as a liquid, and an allergic patient a version made without the offending dye.

Coca-Cola was first sold on 8 May 1886 at Jacobs' Pharmacy in which city, for five cents a glass?

Atlanta. Pharmacist John Pemberton carried a jug of his syrup down the street to the soda fountain; his bookkeeper chose the name, thinking 'the two Cs would look well in advertising'.

Which soft drink did Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Hires showcase at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition?

Root beer. Hires sold it as a 25-cent packet of powder for brewing at home, and the free glasses he poured at the fair turned a slow seller into a booming business.

Which soft drink began life as 'Brad's Drink', mixed by a North Carolina pharmacist at his soda fountain?

Pepsi. Caleb Bradham renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898, then lost the company in 1923 after wild swings in the price of sugar.

Dr Pepper was formulated by pharmacist Charles Alderton in the 1880s at a drugstore in which Texas town?

Customers at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store ordered it by asking for 'a Waco'.

Walgreens was founded in 1901 by pharmacist Charles Walgreen in which city?

Chicago. Walgreens credits one of its soda-fountain men, Ivar 'Pop' Coulson, with creating the malted milkshake there in 1922 by adding scoops of vanilla ice cream to malted milk.

Which crime novelist qualified as a dispenser of medicines in a hospital pharmacy during the First World War?

Agatha Christie. Bored by the monotony of dispensing, she began her first detective novel while working there and took its murder method straight from the pharmacy shelves.

Which drug did Pfizer first test for angina, until trial volunteers reported a surprising side effect?

Viagra. The compound did little for chest pain, but the men in the trials reported erections, so Pfizer changed course and won approval for it in 1998.

Statins such as atorvastatin are prescribed to lower the blood level of what?

Cholesterol. The first statin came from a mould growing on rice from a Kyoto grain shop, found by a Japanese biochemist who had tested thousands of fungi.

Warfarin's anticoagulant effect can be reversed with which of these?

Vitamin K. Warfarin grew out of the hunt for what made cattle bleed to death after eating spoiled sweet clover, and it was sold as a rat killer before doctors prescribed it.

The word 'vaccine' comes from the Latin word for which farm animal?

Cow. Edward Jenner used cowpox to protect people against smallpox, and Louis Pasteur later stretched the word to cover every such jab in Jenner's honour.

Before penicillin, its discoverer found which bacteria-dissolving enzyme in nasal mucus?

Lysozyme. He went on to find it in tears, saliva and milk, but the body's own germ-killer proved better at dissolving harmless bacteria than dangerous ones.

Nicolaes Tulp, the doctor in Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, compiled a 1636 pharmacopoeia for which city?

Amsterdam. Tulp put the idea to fellow physicians over dinner at his house, and the city then ruled that its apothecaries could work from no other book.

Which Revolutionary War general had worked as an apothecary and merchant in Connecticut before the fighting began?

Benedict Arnold. The shopkeeper became one of Washington's best battlefield generals, twice wounded in the American cause, before his treason was uncovered in 1780.

In which Shakespeare play does a penniless apothecary break the law of Mantua to sell the hero a fatal potion?

Romeo and Juliet. Selling such drugs in Mantua meant death, but the starving shopkeeper accepts Romeo's forty ducats with the line 'My poverty, but not my will, consents.'

The word 'pharmacy' traces back to the Greek 'pharmakon', which meant drug, spell and what else?

Poison. The word reached English through Old French 'farmacie', where it meant not a shop but a purgative, a medicine with a laxative effect.

Which symbol identifies pharmacies on streets across France, Italy and Belgium?

The green cross. Pharmacists there once hung out a red cross, and changed colour in the early 1900s after that emblem was reserved for the Red Cross.

Which US vice president was a licensed pharmacist who worked in his father's South Dakota drugstore in the 1930s?

Hubert Humphrey. The Depression forced him to leave university after a year, so he earned a pharmacist's licence and helped keep the family store afloat before returning to his studies.

The Bowl of Hygieia, an old emblem of pharmacy, pairs a cup with which creature?

A snake. Hygieia was the Greek goddess of health, and ancient art shows her snake drinking from a bowl in her hand; a snake also winds around the staff of Asclepius, the god of medicine.

Ayurveda, the medical tradition set out in ancient treatises such as the Sushruta Samhita, comes from which country?

India. The Sushruta Samhita is famed for its surgery: it describes rebuilding a severed nose with a flap of skin cut from the cheek.

Which malaria drug did Chinese chemist Tu Youyou extract from sweet wormwood, earning a 2015 Nobel Prize?

Artemisinin. Her first extracts worked only fitfully, until a remedy book some 1,600 years old gave her the clue: steep the herb in cold water rather than heating it.

Which lemon-lime soda was sold around 1930 as 'Lithiated Lemon Soda', named for a mood-stabilising drug?

7UP claimed to contain lithium citrate, a salt still used to treat bipolar disorder. In 1936 US regulators made its maker drop the health claims, and the 'Lithiated' label went a year later.

The diabetes drug exenatide, sold as Byetta, is a synthetic copy of a peptide found in which lizard's venom?

Gila monster venom yielded exendin-4, a peptide that endocrinologist John Eng isolated in 1992. Exenatide, approved in 2005, opened the way for later drugs of the same class such as Ozempic.

The first cancer chemotherapy drugs of the 1940s were derived from which chemical weapon of the First World War?

Mustard gas turned out to shut down the body's production of blood cells. That clue led researchers at Yale to test a closely related compound on a lymphoma patient during the Second World War.

Which crime novelist qualified as an apothecary's assistant in 1917 and drew on that training for her murder plots?

Agatha Christie worked in a hospital pharmacy in Torquay during the First World War. The murder method in her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came straight out of that job.

Before doctors prescribed it as a blood thinner, warfarin went on sale in 1948 to kill which pests?

Rats were the first target of warfarin, named after WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that backed the research. Doctors took notice in 1951 after a US military recruit swallowed a large dose and recovered fully.

Which explosive ingredient of dynamite has been prescribed since 1878 to relieve chest pain caused by heart disease?

Nitroglycerin widens blood vessels, easing the load on the heart. Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune taming it for blasting, was prescribed it months before he died and called that 'the irony of fate'.

Heroin was sold from 1898 as a supposedly non-addictive remedy for which everyday complaint?

Coughs were the target, and the trademark came from the German 'heroisch', meaning heroic or strong. The 'non-addictive' morphine substitute soon had one of the highest addiction rates of any drug.

Which Revolutionary War general, wounded at Saratoga, first set up as a pharmacist and bookseller in New Haven?

Benedict Arnold opened the shop in 1762 after an apprenticeship with his mother's cousins, apothecaries in Norwich. He later plotted to hand West Point to the British, and his name became a byword for treason.

Which newspaper term began as a Burroughs Wellcome trademark for the drug firm's compressed medicine pills?

Tabloid was the name the London firm gave its compressed tablets in the 1880s. The word soon meant anything small and condensed, and papers offering the news in brief inherited it.

Which breakfast fruit can dangerously raise blood levels of some statins by disabling an enzyme in the gut wall?

Grapefruit knocks out CYP3A4, an enzyme that breaks down almost half of all drugs. The effect was found by accident in 1989, when its juice was used to mask another taste in a drug trial.

Antibiotics such as amoxicillin kill or halt which kind of microbe, which is why they cannot cure a cold?

Bacteria are the targets of antibiotics, which either kill them or stop them multiplying. Colds and flu are caused by viruses, so the tablets do nothing for them.

Which hormone, known to American doctors as epinephrine, does an EpiPen inject to halt a severe allergic reaction?

Adrenaline opens the airways and steadies the circulation within minutes. The pen's spring-loaded design descends from military injectors built to deliver nerve gas antidotes on the battlefield.

Which emergency drug, sold as the nasal spray Narcan, reverses an opioid overdose within minutes?

Naloxone blocks the effects of opioids and restores the breathing they suppress. Sprayed into the nose it starts working in about ten minutes; injected into a vein it takes about two.

Prozac, launched in the late 1980s, eases depression by keeping more of which chemical messenger active in the brain?

Serotonin lingers longer between nerve cells because Prozac delays its reabsorption, which is the 'SRI' in SSRI. Exactly how that lifts mood is still not fully understood.

Botox won its first FDA approval in 1989 to treat muscle disorders affecting which part of the body?

Eyes came first: ophthalmologist Alan Scott developed the injections to straighten a squint and named his drug Oculinum, 'eye aligner'. Approval for smoothing frown lines followed only in 2002.

Minoxidil, the hair-loss treatment sold as Rogaine, was first approved in 1979 as a tablet for which condition?

High blood pressure was the target because minoxidil relaxes the arteries. Patients then started sprouting unexpected hair, and a lotion for thinning scalps was approved in 1988.

Before a genetically engineered version arrived in 1982, medical insulin was taken from the pancreases of which animals?

Pigs and cattle supplied the world's insulin for six decades, and eight ounces of the purified hormone could take two tons of pig parts. Pig insulin differs from the human kind by a single amino acid.

Enovid, first prescribed for menstrual disorders, won FDA approval in 1960 as the world's first what?

Birth control pill history began cautiously: Enovid had been on sale since 1957 for period problems. It could not be legally prescribed to every American woman, married or not, until a 1972 court ruling.

Which drug did Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann test on himself in 1943 before a famously strange bicycle ride home?

LSD had been set aside for five years after Hofmann first made it at the Swiss medicines firm. The date of his wobbly journey, 19 April, is still marked as Bicycle Day.

Which virologist, asked on television who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, replied 'Could you patent the sun?'

Jonas Salk gave that answer to broadcaster Ed Murrow soon after his vaccine was declared safe in 1955. He never sought to profit from it, which helped it spread around the world.

Metformin, the main first-line drug for type 2 diabetes, grew out of research on which plant long used in folk medicine?

Goat's rue had been a folk remedy for centuries before chemists took an interest in it. Metformin's sister drugs phenformin and buformin were later withdrawn, leaving it the survivor of its family.

Captopril, the first ACE inhibitor heart drug, was modelled on a peptide in the venom of which South American animal?

Pit viper venom from Brazil's jararaca was brought to John Vane's laboratory by the Brazilian scientist Sérgio Ferreira. Captopril, a synthetic mimic of one of its peptides, was first made in 1975.

The childhood leukaemia drug vincristine is extracted from which pink-flowered plant native to Madagascar?

Periwinkle from Madagascar holds vincristine in tiny amounts: natural extraction yields less than 0.0003 percent. The drug is still part of standard combinations for leukaemia and Hodgkin lymphoma.

The mould strain that made mass production of penicillin possible was found in 1943 on which fruit in a Peoria market?

Cantaloupe from a Peoria fruit stall gave the US agriculture laboratory in the Illinois city its best sample of the mould. The scientists named it the 'cantaloupe strain'.

The menopause drug Premarin, sold since the 1940s, is named after its source, the urine of which pregnant animals?

Horses, specifically mares in foal, supply the hormones: the brand name is a contraction of 'pregnant mares' urine'. Toronto biochemists first isolated the key oestrogen from it in the late 1930s.

Which tranquilliser, invented by chemist Leo Sternbach, was America's best-selling medicine from 1968 to 1982?

Valium was the second drug of its kind that Sternbach created at Hoffmann-La Roche in New Jersey, after Librium. More than two billion tablets were sold in the United States in 1978 alone.

Ritalin, the ADHD stimulant first made in 1944, was named by chemist Leandro Panizzon after which relative, Marguerite?

His wife Marguerite, nicknamed Rita, took the new compound herself. It was not reported to be a stimulant until 1954, a decade after Panizzon first made it at the Swiss firm CIBA.

Paul Ehrlich's 'magic bullet' Salvarsan, launched in 1910, was the first effective drug against which infection?

Syphilis finally met its match in 'compound 606', whose effect Sahachiro Hata discovered in Ehrlich's laboratory in 1909. The German firm Hoechst sold it as Salvarsan.

Streptomycin, isolated in 1943 in Selman Waksman's Rutgers laboratory, was the first antibiotic cure for which disease?

Tuberculosis had no antibiotic cure until graduate student Albert Schatz isolated the drug from a soil microbe. His supervisor Waksman received the 1952 Nobel Prize for the discovery.

AZT, shelved in the 1960s as a failed cancer drug, was approved in 1987 as the first treatment for which virus?

HIV had no treatment until AZT, a compound made in 1964 with cancer in mind and abandoned when it did nothing in mice. Retested in the 1980s, it became the first antiretroviral medicine.

Salbutamol, known as albuterol in the United States, is the drug in the 'reliever' inhalers used for which condition?

Asthma attacks ease within minutes because salbutamol relaxes and opens the medium and large airways of the lungs. It is sold as Ventolin and is also used for chronic obstructive lung disease.

Which stimulant, added to some headache tablets, is the world's most widely consumed psychoactive drug?

Caffeine modestly improves the effect of painkillers such as ibuprofen when 100 to 130 milligrams is added. Giving up a daily habit abruptly can bring on a headache of its own.

Nitrous oxide, used by dentists to ease pain and anxiety, has which nickname coined by the chemist Humphry Davy?

Laughing gas earned its name from the euphoria Davy felt when he inhaled it as a young experimenter. More than two centuries later it is still used in surgery and dentistry.

Which hormone, released by the brain's pineal gland at night, is sold as a supplement to ease jet lag?

Melatonin was discovered as a pineal extract that lightened the skin of frogs. In adults about 80 percent of each day's supply is made at night.

Allopurinol lowers uric acid to prevent which painful joint condition, once nicknamed 'the disease of kings'?

Gout earned its royal nickname from its link to rich food and obesity. The same tablets are given to prevent certain kidney stones and the uric acid surge that chemotherapy can cause.

Levodopa, which briefly revived the patients in Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, is chiefly used to treat which disease?

Parkinson's is the main use of levodopa, which the body converts into dopamine. Sacks gave it to survivors of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic, with dramatic but temporary results.

Which slow-release painkiller, launched by Purdue Pharma in 1996, became a symbol of America's opioid epidemic?

OxyContin was sold on the promise that one tablet lasted 12 hours. Purdue pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading the public about its addiction risk, and to further federal charges in 2020.

Disulfiram, sold as Antabuse, makes people violently ill within minutes if they consume which substance?

Alcohol intolerance was first noticed in rubber factory workers who handled disulfiram on the job. Danish researchers then turned the compound into a deterrent for problem drinkers.

Which Shakespeare tragedy has an apothecary sell a deadly potion, saying 'My poverty, but not my will, consents'?

Romeo and Juliet has its hero buy the potion in Mantua, where the law punishes the sale with death. Romeo answers the reluctant seller, 'I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.'

In the old apothecaries' system of weights, which unit of twenty grains was one-third of a drachm?

Scruple comes from the Latin for a small pebble, and it was the next step up from the grain: three made a drachm and 24 an ounce. Britain's 1864 pharmacopoeia recommended retiring it.

Pills recovered from a Roman ship that sank around 140 BC were made mainly from compounds of which metal?

Zinc carbonates, the minerals hydrozincite and smithsonite, made up these early tablets. They were an eye medicine, meant for sore eyes rather than for swallowing.

A generic drug name ending in '-mab', such as adalimumab or trastuzumab, marks the medicine as which kind of product?

Monoclonal antibody names all ended in '-mab' until 2021, when newer endings were introduced. Letters just before the ending showed the source, as in '-omab' for those first made in mice.

Which twin brothers, physicians said to have treated the sick without charging a fee, are patron saints of pharmacists?

Cosmas and Damian, by tradition born in Arabia in the third century, are also the patrons of physicians and surgeons. Churches were being dedicated to the pair as early as the fourth century.

The first prescription skin patch, approved in the United States in 1979, delivered scopolamine to prevent what?

Motion sickness was the target, and the patch is still worn behind the ear by scuba divers. Scopolamine's knack for passing through skin was known long before: early modern witchcraft ointments contained it.

Which Democratic presidential nominee of 1968 was a licensed pharmacist who helped run his father's drugstore?

Hubert Humphrey was born above his father's drugstore in South Dakota and finished a two-year pharmacy course in six months. He worked behind the counter from 1931 to 1937 before entering politics.

Prontosil, the first sulfa drug, emerged from a 1930s German search for medicines among which industrial products?

Dyes were screened in a company programme to find ones that might fight infection inside the body. Team leader Gerhard Domagk received the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine for Prontosil.

Which German company, the world's oldest operating drug maker, grew out of a Darmstadt pharmacy acquired in 1668?

Merck grew from the Angel Pharmacy that Friedrich Jacob Merck took over in Darmstadt. Its American offshoot, Merck & Co., was seized by the US government in 1917 and has been a separate company ever since.

Which short-story writer, famed for twist endings, was a licensed pharmacist and the night druggist of an Ohio prison?

O. Henry, born William Sydney Porter, was licensed at 19 after working in his uncle's drugstore in Greensboro. Jailed in 1898, he published 14 stories from his cell under pen names.

Generic names built on the stem '-prazole', such as omeprazole and lansoprazole, belong to which drug class?

Proton pump inhibitors cause a profound and prolonged drop in stomach acid, which gives ulcers and reflux damage time to heal. Shared name endings like this one let prescribers spot a class at a glance.

Which Romantic poet, author of 'Ode to a Nightingale', earned an apothecary's licence in 1816 before giving up medicine?

John Keats spent five years apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary and then trained at Guy's Hospital in London. Within months of qualifying he told his guardian he had resolved to be a poet, not a surgeon.