You Could Look It Up (59 page)

Vermeersch, Arthur,
De castitate et de vitiis contrariis
:
tractatus doctrinalis et moralis
(
On Chastity and Its Opposing Vices: A Moral and Doctrinal Treatise
). Rome: Università Gregoriana, 1919.

Yannes, James A.
Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich
:
With Extensive Historical Exposition
. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2009. By the author of the more wide-ranging
Encyclopedia of Third Reich Tableware
.

Zeynal oglu Dünyamaliyev, Mämmädäli.
Fitosanitariya terminlärinin izahli lügäti
. Baki: Nurlan, 2008. An Azerbaijani glossary of the vocabulary of plant quarantine.

CHAPTER
23

PRESUMED PURITY

Science in a Scientific Age

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the modern scientific establishment was in place. Knowledge about the natural world came not from tradition, not from authority, but from empirical research no longer carried out by gentleman amateurs in potting sheds, but by white-coated specialists in academies or universities, with laboratories fitted with expensive equipment paid for by grants. The amateurs were crowded out by the professional scientists (the English word
scientist
was coined in
1834
), and the volume of research exploded. The rapidly generated knowledge required reference works to be updated constantly.

Pity the nineteenth-century physician or pharmacist, who had to keep pace with an overwhelming amount of new scientific and medical knowledge. Medical people had always been learned, but before modernity they could hope to keep up with all the relevant publications. By the nineteenth century, though, new scientific research was coming in a torrent. This is the world in which one of the most successful of all scientific reference books, the
Merck Index
, came into being.

Merck & Co. has deep roots. In 1668, Friedrich Jacob Merck bought a small shop in Darmstadt, Germany, known as the Engel-Apotheke, or Angel’s Pharmacy, and made it his own. Merck’s nephew took it over on his death, and the business passed from generation to generation. In the
late eighteenth century, it was run by Johann Heinrich Merck, a close friend and collaborator of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (Goethe later claimed he drew the character of Mephistopheles from Merck, who committed suicide in 1791.) In 1816, Heinrich Emanuel Merck—a descendant of the original Friedrich Jacob, and the sixth of that surname to run the company—took over the store. Heinrich had studied pharmacy in Berlin and Vienna, and he had ambitious ideas about the family business.

The company was turning its attention from compounding drugs for its own purposes to manufacturing them for the rest of the profession. In 1827 they opened a manufacturing plant in Darmstadt, and by 1850, several dozen employees worked there. By this time the long-established business had ties with some of the most important scientific interests in Germany and throughout Europe—Emanuel Merck, for instance, supplied Sigmund Freud with his cocaine.
1

Merck had its eye on the American market, and they began selling in the United States under the E. Merck trademark in the nineteenth century—eventually they would incorporate there as Merck & Co. To advertise their offerings, in 1889 they released
Merck’s Index of Fine Chemicals and Drugs for the Materia Medica and the Arts
. Unlike so many of the reference works considered here, this one was not compiled with the improvement of humanity in mind: it began its life simply as a company’s catalog of “the full line of my products, numbering to-day upwards of 5,000 medicinal, analytical, and technical Chemicals.”
2

Whoever wrote the copy for the
Index
(it is signed “E. Merck,” but there is no reason to assume Emanuel wrote it himself) was a serious marketer. The tone is signaled with breathless exclamation points: “The most vital interests of your patients, gentlemen physicians!—and of your customers, gentlemen of the pharmaceutical profession!—depend, as you are well aware, on the reality of the Presumed Purity, of the Prescribed Strength, and of the Correct Condition of the materials employed in filling prescriptions.” The
Index
looked backward to its long history—a grand-looking patent, in Gothic letters, from the Landgrave of Hesse to George Frederick Merck in 1668 was followed by a list of “a few of the
HONORABLE AWARDS
extended to the firm of
E. MERCK
” over the years, including a gold medal from the Pharmaceutical Society of Paris in 1830 “For the Relief of Mankind”
3
—but it also looked forward to the future. The company promised rapid delivery, taking advantage of a new American office and American factories rather than depending on steamships.

Buy only the real thing, Merck exhorted: “I would earnestly entreat my friends, throughout both professions, to insist rigidly that Merck’s Chemicals be furnished to them, by dealers, in the
original
packages.”
4
At the bottom of every page appeared

When ordering, specify: “MERCK’S”!

The
American Monthly Microscopical Journal
found this approach distasteful: “This indicates an advertising purpose in the volume, and seems to us an unnecessary blemish.”
5
But the author reminds readers not to let the apparent hucksterism turn them off: “One remark may be
needed by my professional friends, as to the Price-notes placed opposite the names of most substances in the following List.
Those Price-notes are
not
intended to give this work the character of a commercial or business Price-list
.”
6

The chemicals appear in alphabetical order, though
Merck’s Index
wrestled with the problem of inconsistent nomenclature. It used the system adopted by the Chemical Society in England but also included many older, common names, with cross-references: “But,
whichever
the ‘odd names’ thus received may be,—the substance in question is
invariably listed under a proper chemical name
also
, and is, as a rule,
detailed
and
priced
there!
”
7
There was also a strange mix of metric and imperial units, and a list of abbreviations in the back explained that “gm” refers to “gramme[s] (=15.42328—or, about 15½—grains),” and “cm” means “centimetre[s] (=0.3937—or, about 4/10—of an inch).”

Turning the pages of the
Index
provides an education in the cutting edge of the chemical sciences a century and a quarter ago. Various acids occupy the first eight pages; pure caffeine could be had for $8 per ounce; $1.75 would buy fifteen grams of pure gold. Aspirin was not offered; the name was still a trademark owned by Bayer. But “acid, salicylic” was available for anywhere from 75¢ to $3.00 a pound, depending on process.

While all of these things appear in chemical catalogs today, other offerings remind us that this was a different era, including essential spirits of prunes and “Blood, bullock’s, (Sanguis Tauri [Bovis]), dry, powdered.” Most surprising to modern eyes is the list of narcotics available to anyone who wanted them. What are now known as controlled substances were not controlled then. In the United States, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 started to require labeling information about ten “addictive” or “dangerous” substances, including alcohol and opium. The first edition of
Merck’s Index
includes cannabinon (a resin made from cannabis flowers); later editions include other forms of cannabis. Fully eighteen varieties of cocaine could be had for the asking, along with eleven forms of codeine, thirty-two forms of morphine, and one that mixed codeine and morphine together. Laudanum—opium dissolved in alcohol, a favorite treatment for pretty much any malady—cost $1.50 a pound. The International Opium Convention did not convene until 1912; before that, opium could be had legally without so
much as a doctor’s prescription, and an advertisement in the back offered
METCALF’S COCA WINE FROM FRESH COCA LEAVES
. Even more nervous-making are all the poisons offered for sale. A pound of hemlock would set one back four bits. Curare could be had for 25¢ per 15 grams, arsenic trioxide (“arsenious acid”) for a dollar a pound, strychnine for two dollars per eighth-ounce vial, and pure potassium cyanide for four dollars a pound. For two dollars an ounce, one could get “Ouabain … an aqueous extract from whose root and bark forms the arrow-poison of the East-African Comalis,” which could be used as a “heart-poison.” (Pharmaceutical companies still sell many of these “addictive” and “dangerous” compounds, but the regulatory paperwork required is daunting.)

The first
Merck’s Index
is in reality a 170-page advertisement, but it was useful in its way; it collected all the chemicals and medicines any physician or pharmacist might need. It impressed early reviewers with the range of medicines on offer, as well as the background information it compiled. “This work is essentially a price list,” wrote one review, “covering the whole range of drugs and compounds used in medicine, and it will be of value to the large body of physicians who have to dispense their own medicines, and to many others who like to know the cost of the drugs which they use or order. Incidentally it contains a great deal of useful knowledge about the drugs employed.”
8
Over time its commercial purpose shifted: as the
Index
grew in subsequent editions, the organizing principle was not “chemicals offered for sale by Merck” but chemicals, period.

The Merck Index spawned a related
Merck’s Manual
in 1899, properly
Merck’s Manual of the Materia Medica: Together with a Summary of Therapeutic Indications and a Classification of Medicaments: A Ready-Reference Pocket Book for the Practicing Physician
. It opened by justifying the need for another manual: “Memory is treacherous… . When the best remedy is wanted, … it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to recall the whole array of available remedies so as to pick out the best.” And so the
Manual
—part 1 covering “a descriptive survey, in one alphabetic series, of the entire Materia Medica,” part 2 “a summary of Therapeutic Indications for the employment of remedies, arranged according to the Pathologic Conditions to be combated,” and part 3 “a
Classification of Medicaments in accordance with their Physiologic Actions”—was there to offer a comprehensive list of the medicines on offer.
9
It remains in use today as the
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
, among the bestselling medical books in history.

Merck & Co. has had its ups and downs. In 1917, the U.S. government seized all the American assets of the German-based Merck—a chemical company operated by the enemy during a time of war—and turned it into an independent American company. A century later, the wounds have still not healed: in March 2010, the German company Merck KGaA sued Facebook for allowing the American Merck & Co. to claim the name “Merck” on the social networking site. But today the American Merck is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world—with its merger with Shering-Plough in 2009, it became the second largest.