FEATURE STORY — September/October 2009

 

The Comeback College

This fall the UIC College of Pharmacy celebrates its 150th anniversary, a remarkable achievement given the setbacks it faced during its early years as the Chicago College of Pharmacy

By David Veenstra

Pharmacy students practice their craft at the Dispensing Laboratory located on 12th Street

On Friday night, Oct. 6, 1871, professor George Hambright took to the podium at the Chicago College of Pharmacy, giving the week’s materia medica lecture. By all accounts, it was a memorable evening.  The College was beginning a new academic year, only the second since the Civil War. It also was the last time the College would meet under that constitution. Two days later, the Great Chicago Fire swept through the central business district, destroying the institution. The only identifiable object remaining was a charred Parrish gas stove. The College’s journal, The Pharmacist, recorded the devastation:

One of the saddest things connected with the late fire, and peculiarly unfortunate as bearing on the interest of the science of Pharmacy in the West, is the total loss of property belonging to the Chicago College of Pharmacy. This loss includes, of course, all its valuable furniture and appliances, apparatus and library—the most complete in chemistry and pharmacy to be found in the West—and a large and valuable cabinet, the labor of many years in selecting and accumulating.

At the time, these ashes seemed to represent not only the basis for the College’s academic work, but the nascent professional aspirations of Chicago pharmacists. Yet it was these same ashes that gave the College the resources and unity necessary to move forward and become the University of Illinois’ first professional school in Chicago.

Patent Medicines and Quackery

In many ways, pharmacy was one of Chicago’s first growth industries, with two of the city’s first five stores being drugstores.

Since its inception, the Chicago College of Pharmacy placed a strong emphasis on laboratory instruction and research. Pharmacy students gather for a picture in the chemistry lab in 1909 (upper right). The pharmacy class of 1906 poses for its junior class picture in front of General Logan’s statue in Grant Park (bottom right). Note the skull-and-crossbones insignia on the Illinois Pharmacy pennant.

To practice pharmacy, one only needed to have served an apprenticeship at an established store. But with Chicago’s rapidly growing population (from 4,470 in 1840 to more than 100,000 in 1860), and the advent of patent medicines (drugs that claimed amazing benefits but provided no list of ingredients) came the need to distinguish honest purveyors from snake-oil salesmen.

On Sept. 5, 1859, after months of lobbying by four of Chicago’s most prominent druggists, the city’s pharmacists agreed to establish a professional association. Although their craft required considerable knowledge, the lack of a formal accreditation process restrained their professional assertions.

Designated the Chicago College of Pharmacy, the new association sought to end secret formulas, universally adopt the prescriptions of the National Pharmacopoeia and prohibit physicians from compounding medications. It also established a school of pharmacy (also named the College of Pharmacy), only the sixth such school founded in the United States, and the first west of the Alleghenies.

CCP classes in chemistry, pharmacy and materia medica began a few weeks later. The format was similar to that of most medical schools at the time. Students, who were of “good moral character” and had begun apprenticeships, sat for lectures three evenings a week, with each class lasting 20 weeks. Outside of class, they were expected to “read, study and experiment, utilizing the opportunities afforded in the shops.”

To attain a graduate in pharmacy degree or PhG, a student had to complete four years of apprenticeship, attend two years of classes, write an original thesis and pass a final examination. Save for the final, none of the work was graded, nor was any of it particularly difficult. In fact, there were no labs, not even in chemistry.

Forty students attended the first term, meeting in rented halls and the backrooms of various drugstores. Classes were held at night. 

Courses resumed the following summer. But the financial panic of 1859-60 and resulting political unrest forced administrators to abbreviate the session. The next year, the Civil War broke out, and classes were suspended. In 1862, CCP operations ceased entirely.

Ironically, while the Civil War ended formal pharmacy education in Chicago, the need for such training was increasing. After the war, pill manufacturers perfected their processes and flooded the market with products—some provided sophisticated drugs and others patent medicines and nostrums. Even more troubling, many returning veterans who had served as nurses or clerks dispensing medical supplies decided to hang out a shingle. From 1861-65, the number of Chicago drugstores increased from 73 to more than 100. Meanwhile, the quality of prescriptions deteriorated.

The Great Recovery

It wasn’t public outcry over the unregulated pharmacists that motivated CCP members to reconvene, but the reception of an unexpected gift, one that included more than 700 rare chemical and materia medica specimen, from a Philadelphia firm in 1867. To house the collection, CCP rented space in the Rice Building on Dearborn Street. CCP members also agreed to meet there regularly.

To raise the stature of pharmacy, the reconstituted CCP placed a greater emphasis on research and legislative advocacy. This dictate was best exemplified in the work of Albert E. Ebert. Sporting a long, flowing beard, Ebert attended classes at the College when it first opened in 1859. He continued his studies in Philadelphia during the Civil War, and then moved to Germany, where he studied under Justus von Liebig, then one of the world’s most influential chemists.  A key CCP member, Ebert edited The Pharmacist, helped revise the United States Pharmacopoeia and represented the organization at a series of international pharmaceutical conferences. He also helped CCP draft state legislation to license pharmacists, which the organization submitted in 1870.

After a decade-long lapse, courses at the CCP began anew that fall. About 40 students enrolled, including the first woman candidate, Amelia Johnson. Many of them were in attendance a year later when the CCP faced its biggest setback, the Great Chicago Fire.

CCP’s immediate reaction to the fire was to aid drug clerks and their families whose stores had been destroyed. At the same time, CCP decided to “retrieve the loss and establish the school anew.” Ebert, whose household had been spared, was made “a committee of one,” and tasked with obtaining aid. The response to his pleas was overwhelming. Pharmacy organizations across the nation established relief funds for the city’s drug clerks. The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy offered to honor all of the CCP’s course tickets (several students accepted). And in Europe, Dr. John Attfield, a close friend of Ebert’s, obtained pledges for chemicals and books along with several microscopes and other high-tech scientific instru­ments. Yet even before all of the supplies had arrived, classes restarted in October 1872.

The Onslaught of Diploma Mills

In 1881, CCP helped win passage of the Illinois Pharmacy Act, which required pharmacists to complete a PhG degree, serve an apprenticeship and pass the Illinois Board of Pharmacy examination before practicing. What should have been a boon for CCP, however, quickly turned into a crisis, with upstart “diploma mills” churning out degrees for less money.

With CCP operations in peril, some faculty floated the idea of merging the organization, which had national name recognition and a formidable library, with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But U of I Trustees argued that the school’s charter limited its activities to the boundaries of Champaign County. Perhaps a bigger obstacle was the University’s own four-year bachelor’s degree program in pharmacy, which it instituted in 1874 (the program did not, however, include an apprentice­ship). In either case, the Uni­versity rejected the proposal.

Other CCP members suggested turning the organization into a shareholder-owned, proprietary institution, similar to other contemporary professional schools. But Ebert sternly reminded them that the “nucleus for the present College property had been presented to the College by the pharmacists of Europe to be held in trust by this association for education purposes and . . . not divided among the members.”

The deteriorating financial situation only widened the growing riffs over issues such as faculty salaries, the rigor of the curriculum and the need for apprenticeships. The divisions culminated with a group of faculty defecting to Northwestern University in 1886 and forming the Illinois College of Pharmacy.

Soon thereafter, talks recommenced with the University of Illinois. The General Assembly expedited the process when it passed an 1895 measure that allowed the University to establish professional schools anywhere within the state. As a result, CCP members voted to convert the organization into a corporate entity for the purpose of “affiliation with the University of Illinois… and tender to them the title and property of the Chicago College of Pharmacy.” The University accepted the offer, making CCP the University of Illinois School of Pharmacy, effective May 1, 1896. (It was initially designated as a “school” rather than a “college” because the program did not meet the University’s baccalaureate requirements.)

The merger also cleared the path for similar affiliations. Chicago’s College of Physicians and Surgeons joined the University in 1897, becoming the Department of Medicine; and in 1901, the Columbian Dental College became the School of Dentistry.

A More Perfect Union

The acquisition brought an end to the Urbana campus’ pharmacy program. But little changed at either campus. Course catalogs printed in Urbana listed pharmacy classes as the Chicago College of Pharmacy, while Chicago pharmacy students shunned the U of I and showed little interest in attending athletic events or wearing the school colors of blue and orange.

It ultimately took two events for the union to be completed and the College of Pharmacy’s professional aspirations to be realized. The first centered on the actions of the College’s new dean, W.B. Day, who in 1914 persuaded the Board of Trustees to relocate the school from the business district (where it had been located in various buildings since its founding) to the West Side near Cook County Hospital and U of I’s Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry.

The second occurred in 1917 when Illinois passed legislation requiring licensed pharmacists to be graduates from a state-recognized school or department of pharmacy. This resulted in the closing of diploma mills.

That same year, the Illinois College of Pharmacy, where enrollment had fallen to 59 students, closed its doors and was absorbed by the University.

Since then, the UIC College of Pharmacy has become one of the top such schools in the nation. It presently enrolls 650 professional students and 140 graduate students, and awards more than 150 professional degrees and 40 graduate degrees annually. One out of every three pharmacists practicing in Illinois is a graduate of the school.

The College also has become one of the nation’s premier research institutions and ranks fourth in National Institutes of Health funding. Its faculty and researchers have developed new applications for existing drugs to fight superficial bladder cancer, identified new drugs to shorten tuberculosis treatment, improved drug delivery systems, designed software to prevent drug-name confusion and medical errors, and created the world’s largest database of herbs and medicinal plant research.

The College’s former storefront locations have given way to teaching and research facilities that occupy nearly a city-sized block. No doubt Albert Ebert, George Hambright and their colleagues would be proud of the College’s many accomplishments.