The history of pharmacy in Germany is institutionally well endowed. Erika Hickel lists fi ve university establishments in which it is anchored as an academic discipline: Brunswick, Greifswald, Heidelberg, Marburg, and Munich. Not a few readers of Ambix are familiar with Braunschweiger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Pharmazie (und der Naturwissenschaften) (from 1957).
It was in Brunswick that the author, a trained pharmacist, was active as a teacher and researcher. Indeed, the book draws on forty years of working and thinking about the broader context of pharmaceutical history - attested by twenty-seven references to publications (which she authored, edited, and co-edited) in the bibliography, listing more than nine hundred items.
The major concern of the book is to understand the historical, sociocultural, intellectual and ethnological areas where medicines (Arzneimittel) came from, and were made use of, from about 1900 BC to about 1980. The book is nothing if not wide-ranging in space and time in looking at the human use of medical materials in four continents over the centuries.
It is organised chronologically into ten chapters and ten Exkurse (appendices), according to more or less pragmatic periodisation criteria. Chapter IV is called: "Medicines in the Age of Town Trades, Pestilences, Voyages of Discovery and Humanism about 1300 to 1500." The title of the adjoining Exkurs is: "Ethnopharmacy II: The Intercultural Exchange in the Colonial Period." Whereas the title of Chapter IX is "The Products of the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Scientific Medicine ca. 1840 to 1900," that of the Exkurs is "Unsolved Problems of Provision of Medicines in the 19th and 20th Century up to 1980." The last chapter, dealing with insulin, sulfonamides, sexual hormones, penicillin, etc., carries the name "The 'Cosmopolitan' Medicines of the 20th Century."
No doubt readers will welcome the historical pharmaceutical glossary. A striking feature of the volume is the large number of tables, attempting to draw together the wealth of historical, economic, technical, scientific and professional material embedded in the text. It seems to confi rm John M. Riddle's view that:
There is a core of around 300 drugs that constantly appear in the medical documents, be they Greek, Latin, Chinese, or other ancient languages. Until the 19th century, there was a remarkable consistency about the drugs used and the resistance to changes in natural product drugs . . . The medicinal usage . . . of these substances, while known as part of a plant, was discovered by folk medicine long before medicine and chemistry isolated the compounds.
In contrast many drugs are "new" to modern times in another sense. By 1979, 80% of the twentyfive single ingredient drugs most frequently prescribed in the United States were introduced after 1950. One half of them were introduced after 1960. [Quid pro quo: Studies in the History of Drugs (Aldershot, 1992), xv].
Erika Hickel's specific contribution draws primarily on her illuminating studies of the changing relationships between academia, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and the state in Germany during 1870-1914. The letter by Hoechst (1884) to the Imperial Health Office (Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt) (pp. 416-18) indicates the shape of things to come: that is, lobbying as an integral component of corporate strategy.
At this point, it may be added that the perception of that societal development (along with interest in feminism) had to do with Erika Hickel's turning to active politics, culminating in her election to the Federal Assembly (Bundestag) in the 1980s. She belonged to the first batch of deputies for the Greens, representing them in the Committee for Research and Technology, where she raised issues regarding the compatibility of scientific-technical developments with ecological and social needs (nuclear energy and genetic engineering). The issues are still with us.
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