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The Business of Medicine: A History of Glaxo. By Edgar Jones. Profile Books Limited, 2001. xxiii + 520 pp. Tables, photos, illustrations, index, notes, and bibliography. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN 1-861-97340-3.
Few pharmaceutical companies have been the subjects of scholarly histories. Within the past ten years, however, two such histories have been written of Glaxo. In 1992, R. P T. Davenport-Hines and J. Slinn published Glaxo: A History to 1962. Now Edgar Jones suggests that it was about 1962-where Davenport-Hines and Slinn leave off-that things began to get really interesting at Glaxo.
Such is the case made by Jones in his informative book, The Business of Medicine, a history of what by the year 2000 would become the world's largest pharmaceutical company. It was the transfer of power from chairman Harry Jephcott to his successors that finally allowed Glaxo's research laboratories to obtain the resources required to turn the firm into a pharmaceutical company of the first order. During Jephcott's years at the firm (1919-63), Glaxo was transformed from a food business to a pharmaceutical house, launching its first vitamins in 1924 and becoming a major producer of penicillin during World War II.
Jones tells the story of Jephcott's ambivalent relationship with research at Glaxo. More than any other individual, Jephcott-who came to the firm as its first chemist-was responsible for the establishment in 1935 of a research budget for laboratory work at Glaxo. This reflected, notes Jones, the evolution from "analytical testing designed to monitor the quality of food products and development work to improve their nutritional value" (p. 111). Later, during his years as managing director, president, and chairman, Jephcott systematically withheld resources from...