L & C Home

Bookplate Archive Home

Bookplates Index by Issue

Bookplate Index by Library or Collector

Bookplate Index by Country

Bookplate Index by Designer

Subscribe

Resources for Library History

Contact L&C

Chicago College Pharmacy

            The Great Chicago Fire of 8 and 9 October 1871 destroyed the Chicago College Pharmacy, its library, and the editorial offices and back files of the Pharmacist and Chemical Record published by the Chicago College of Pharmacy. The college was founded in 1859, the sixth school of pharmacy in the United States, and it had had its struggles, lapsing during the Civil War and reopening just two years before the Great Fire. Much of the story of the college and of the effect of the disastrous fire on its library can be found in the Pharmacist and Chemical Record, which carried papers presented at meetings or reprinted from other journals; letters to the editor; excerpts from other journals; book reviews; obituaries; announcements about sessions at the Chicago College of Pharmacy listing dates, faculty, lecture fees, and times; and reports of American and British professional meetings.

            The April 1871 issue of the Pharmacist and Chemical Record reported that lectures were being given, the first series for some time, and that the trustees were “highly gratified with the success which has so far followed the re-establishment of the school of pharmacy.” Unfortunately, the November-December issue had to report that the fall course of lectures, which had just begun on 2 October 1871, the week before the fire, with an address by E. H. Sargent, the president of the college, to a class of between forty and fifty students, was discontinued. The library, which the Pharmacist and Chemical Record called “the most complete in chemistry and pharmacy to be found in the West,” suffered the same kind of setback. The journal had only just reported that at their September 27 meeting the trustees of the college had decided to have a librarian and an assistant librarian appointed and to open the library collection to nonmembers, such as druggists and druggists’ assistants. That plan was interrupted by the fire. The trustees were not able to meet again until 23 November 1871, at which time they reviewed their situation. The Pharmacist and Chemical Record reports in its November-December issue that with butt $276 at hand (and that included the library fund) and hope for realizing only 3 percent of their three-thousand-dollar insurance policy, things did not look promising.

            In the January 1872 issue of the Pharmacist and Chemical Record an editorial praises the donations and support for the regrowth of Chicago institutions in general, including the Academy of Science and the Historical Society, and the replacement of several burned libraries with a “free library.” The issue also acknowledges a number of individual gifts received toward rebuilding the college’s library, including Bloxam’s Chemistry from R. Rother, Esq., Chicago, and back volumes of the Pharmacist, more or less complete, from T. H. Barr, Terre Haute, Indiana, Wm. F. Smith & Son, Monmouth, Illinois, and W. M. Dall, Chicago.

            That January issue also informs the readers that in England a committee had been appointed and an appeal issued for “funds, books, apparatus, etc.” H. B. Brady, Esq., and Professor John Attfield are named as leaders in the British relief effort. Reprinted is the 9 December 1871 editorial from the British journal Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions, in which the “dread calamity, the details of which are known to all the world,” is lamented, the committee for relief is described, and the appeal made.  It suggests that books, museum and lecture specimens, and apparatus can all be sent to John Attfield, F.R.S. (1835-1911), who is directing the effort. The editorial states quite clearly that any cheques and money subscriptions received will be earmarked for books. Some early donations to the British relief effort are recorded, notably, a bound set of journals and indexes from the Pharmaceutical Society, fifty-four foreign volumes by Mr. Joseph Ince, and monetary contributions from students.

            Attfield, organizer of the British relief effort, had been a professor of practical chemistry in the School of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain since 1862. A proponent of pharmaceutical education, he was the author of one of the field’s standard textbooks, the first edition entitled Introduction to Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and for the eighteen editions that followed entitled Chemistry: General, Medical, and Pharmaceutical, Including the Chemistry of the British Pharmacopeoia: A Manual on the Science of Chemistry and Its Application in Medicine and Pharmacy. Attfield was “the London analyst to the fire insurance offices” and wrote a pamphlet about fires, so he was doubly appropriate as the organizer of British relief efforts after the fire.1

            The printed materials received from Great Britain were bookplated “From the Pharmacists of Great Britain to the Chicago College of Pharmacy, 1871-1872.” The bookplate, which measures 10 cm. X 6 cm., also bears the words Concordia soll ihr Rame senn.

            In America, the pharmacist Albert Ethelbert Ebert (1840-1906), professor of pharmacy at the Chicago College of Pharmacy, organized the receipt and acknowledgment of donations after the disaster and fostered the regrowth of the college’s library. Ebert, then associate editor of the Pharmacist and Chemical Record, was very active in the pharmacy field in general and a tireless supporter of the college in particular. He had been instrumental in reopening it after its lapse, and more than a quarter of a century later, in 1896, while a member of its advisory board, he helped it merge with the University of Illinois. A practicing pharmacist and owner of a pharmacy at Twelfth and State Streets in Chicago from 1868 to 1877, he was also an advocate of scientific research and established the American Pharmaceutical Association’s Ebert Prize for research. In spite of his heavy involvement with rebuilding the college and the pharmacy community in Chicago, he found time two years later to take over the editorship of the Pharmacist and Chemical Record and accept the presidency of the American Pharmaceutical Association. Near the end of his career Ebert found time to pursue his historical interests and became the unofficial historian of the Chicago Veteran Druggists Association, founded in 1898 for those pharmacists in business in Chicago prior to the Great Fire.2 Ebert’s name and “reputation and wide acquaintance” were an important factor in the rebuilding of the college and its library.3

            The library was successfully rebuilt, and a correspondence, news notes, and meeting minutes published over a two-year period in British and American pharmacy journals such as Chemist and Druggist, the Pharmacist and Chemical Record, and Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions document “the catastrophe” and requests for aid and include itemized lists of donors and donations from individuals and groups in America and Great Britain and on the Continent. By July 1872 the Pharmacist and Chemical Record could announce that almost one thousand books, as well as many journals, had been received. The library’s renewal included the trustees’ election of E. C. Bronson as librarian and curator in the fall of 1872. Neither the library nor the catalog was ready. but the December 1872 Pharmacist and Chemical Record announced that the library was to be open for two hours, three evenings a week. The collection rebuilt after the Great Fire can be reconstructed now from the published records and from those books that are now part of Special Collections, Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Judith A. Overmier,

School of Library and Information Studies,

University of Oklahoma  

Notes

Bookplate courtesy of Archives/Special Collections, Library of the Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 35, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 354-357.]