Pharmacy History West to East


By: Bob Priddy T


he traditional telling of the history of American pharmacists says Gysbert van Imbroch, a Dutch surgeon in New York, might have opened the first


“drug store” in North America in 1653. He was 23 years old. Irish immigrant Christopher Marshall,


disowned by his family when he came here at the age of 18, opened another one of the early American apothecaries in 1729 in Philadelphia at the age of twenty. His chemistry and pharmacy business furnished large quantities of drugs and medicines to the Continental Army and to the Founding Fathers in the Continental Congress. The telling of the stories of these two


young man is typical of the flawed American narrative most of us learned that is reflected in some of our contemporary politics. American poet Walt Whitman illuminated that flaw when he refused to compose a poem celebrating the 333rd anniversary of the settling of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Whitman wrote, “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them…Impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake… To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect—grander in religiousness


and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor…” If, then, we consider American history


from west to east instead of east to west, we gain a new historical perspective and a new perspective who we are as a nation. And we meet a man who might be the


father of the American pharmacy, preceding van Imbroch and Christopher Marshall by more than a century, if not two centuries. His story is one of the greatest but seldom-told American adventures. The Texas Tech Jerry Hodge School of


Pharmacy suggests Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca “was one of the first Europeans to practice pharmacy and medicine in North America. As a slave to Texas Native Americans, he was forced “to treat victims of the epidemic diseases that accompanied the explorers. To do so, Cabeza de Vaca mixed his own European knowledge with Native American medicine, herbs, concoctions and magic.” When did he do all of this? During an


expedition that began in Santo Domingo with 600 men in 1527, and ended in 1536, an estimated 3,000 miles westward with only four survivors. We shall not go into details of his epic trek from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but a map might encourage independent reading about it. The school, considers Cabeza de Vaca as the


father of European medicine and pharmacy in the New World. That might seem to be a stretch, given his own accounts, but other


historians who see the history of pharmacy through the eyes of five more centuries of science, see echoes of his story in today’s industry. “The way we treated the sick,” he wrote


later, “was to make over them the sign of the cross while breathing on them, recite a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray to God, Our Lord, as best we could to give them good health and inspire them to do us some favors. Thanks to His will and the mercy He had upon us, all those for whom we prayed, as soon as we crossed them, told the others that they were cured and felt well again. For this they gave us good cheer, and would rather be without food themselves so as to give it to us…” Later, as he and his dwindling group moved


west from Florida, he relates another healing experience for a man who carried within his chest an arrowhead shot in his back by an enemy “a long time ago.” The tip was close to the man’s heart. “He said it gave him much pain, and that on


this account he was sick. I touched the region of the body and felt the arrowhead, and that it had pierced the cartilage. So, with


30 Missouri PHARMACIST | Volume 98, Issue II | Summer 2024


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