The Business of Medicine

This book is the second commissioned history of Glaxo published in recent years. The first—Richard Davenport-Hines and Judy Slinn, Glaxo: A History to 1962 (1992)—told Glaxo's story from its beginnings in the 1840s as a general store in New Zealand to the retirement of Harry Jephcott as chairman and managing director in 1963. It was the story of how Joseph Nathan & Co., the producer of a dried milk powder called Glaxo, became a major pharmaceutical company within Britain and the Commonwealth. Exported to Britain as an infant food, Glaxo the milk powder was the mainstay of the company's business before the Second World War. In the 1920s, however, Nathan's diversified into vitamin supplements, and in 1935 established Glaxo Laboratories, under Jephcott, which in 1947 swallowed the parent company. Davenport-Hines and Slinn traced Glaxo/Nathan's growing interest in pharmaceuticals from its initial focus on vitamins to its later work with penicillin, the corticosteroids, vaccines, and the antibiotic griseofulvin. They also detailed the company's management and marketing strategies across the world. One might have expected Edgar Jones to take up the story from 1962—but in fact the first 144 pages cover much the same ground as the earlier book, though Jones has gone back to the original sources and gives a [End Page 646] slightly different twist to the tale. It is only in chapter 7 that the book begins to cover the post-Jephcott era. Presumably, GlaxoSmithKline (as it is now known) wanted its history packaged in one volume

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