(born July 4, 1819, Wilmington, Del., U.S.—died Oct. 25, 1900, Brooklyn, N.Y.) U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturer. He earned a medical degree and later worked on U.S.
Navy ships; his work alerted him to the poor quality of the medicines supplied to the Navy, which he persuaded to manufacture its own drugs. At the Brooklyn Naval Hospital (from 1851) he devised a safe method for making anesthetic ether and also discovered processes for making chloroform, fluid extracts, and bismuth salts. In 1858 he set up his own Brooklyn laboratory; the Union Army during the Civil War relied heavily on his drugs, and by 1883 he was manufacturing 324 products and selling them around the world. A Quaker idealist, he refused to patent his medicines, and he crusaded for purity in drug manufacture. He did not live to see the culmination of his work: the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1904.
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