Celebrating the nation’s 250th: America’s first hospital pharmacy

Abstract

Compounding drugs, seeking operational funding, and administering medications to patients. The nation’s earliest hospital pharmacists shared some duties with today’s pharmacists—though they were also, literally, pulling teeth. To mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, the ASHP News Center looked back at the nation’s first hospital pharmacy, established in 1752 at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, now part of University of Pennsylvania Health System. Like a miniature apothecary America’s first hospital was opened in 1751 by physician Thomas Bond, his friend Benjamin Franklin, and a group of wealthy Quakers, according to a 1976 AJHP article by the late William Williams. The hospital was founded with the mission of providing comfort to the “deserving poor,” lower-class working people or their dependents who fell on hard times because of illness, according to a 1994 AJHP article by Gregory Higby, the Fischelis Scholar and former executive director of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy.