Back to previousHenry Wellcome's apprenticeship
30 October 2008. By Penny Bailey.
Rochester
In 1870, aged 17, Henry Wellcome headed east from Garden City to the larger town of Rochester, where a friend of his uncle’s, surgeon Dr William Worrall Mayo, helped him find a job in the drug store beneath his office.
Mayo had studied chemistry under John Dalton in Manchester before moving to America and gave the young Wellcome lessons in chemistry and physics. He also urged him not to settle for the life of a small-town pharmacist, instead encouraging him to leave for college in Chicago to further his training.
"I owe whatever success I have attained in the world to Dr William Worrall Mayo, who took an interest in me and gave me my start." Henry Wellcome, 1935.
When his Chicago college was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Wellcome moved to Philadelphia. There he apprenticed himself to a local apothecary and attended evening classes at the prestigious Philadelphia College of Pharmacy.
At college he specialised in the marketing and production of drugs, and made important contacts, one of whom was Silas Burroughs, a sales representative for the Philadelphia-based pharmacist John Wyeth & Brother Ltd.
“I have not bought a rag of clothes since I came to the city, and have not a whole pair of pants or boots to my name. Have had to wear rubbers over my boots to keep them together.” Henry Wellcome.
Travelling salesman
After graduating in 1874, Wellcome chose to move further east and got a job as a travelling salesman with Caswell Hazard & Co, a large New York pharmaceutical firm. It was the age of the steam train, and railway networks had sprung up across America. Drug companies were making use of these to send a new style of travelling salesman far and wide to promote their products.
After two years' selling Caswell and Hazard's products to doctors and druggists across America Henry joined the large pharmaceutical firm, McKesson and Robbins to promote their newly-introduced gelatin-coated tablets, for a salary of $16 per week.
Their best salesmen were given the additional task of investigating raw materials that might lead to new drugs. As one of the firm’s brightest young talents, Wellcome was sent to scour the rainforests of Peru and Ecuador for Indian remedies and bring back samples of herbs, roots and bark for testing.
He was also commissioned to search for new sources of cinchona bark, the source of quinine, long known for its medicinal effects against malaria. At the time, quinine was one of America’s most important medicines, and McKesson & Robbins was worried about its growing shortage.
Wellcome recorded a detailed description of how the Indian bark collectors felled trees and removed the bark, and how, within minutes, the cream-colored alkaloid turned dark red from exposure to the air.
He also described how the upland forests of the Andes were strewn with the skeletons of Indians who had lost their balance on the narrow gorge paths while transporting bales of bark for their white bosses - another indication of his instinctive sympathy for traditional peoples. Wellcome also showed environmental concerns ahead of his time when he commented on the "ruinous system of destroying the trees".
By 1879 (aged 26) Wellcome had an established reputation as a pharmaceutical salesman and published a description of his expedition for the American Journal of Pharmacy, and other papers in the Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association and the Pharmaceutical Journal of Great Britain.
As he was writing up his findings about cinchona and the numerous botanical specimens he brought with him, Wellcome struck up a correspondence with his old classmate, Burroughs. The letters they exchanged led to the formation of one of the most successful pharmaceutical companies in the world.
