Newfoundland Drugstores: A History

Recreation.

INTRODUCTION

And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,

An alligator stuffed, and other skins

Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves

A beggarly account of empty boxes,

Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,

Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses

Were thinly scattered to make a show.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, c. 1595

Shakespeare’s shop, even though rundown, captured a sense of mystique and distinctiveness surrounding drugstores that persisted for centuries.¹ Newfoundland’s island isolation, British colonial status until it became a Canadian province in 1949, and ofen hard times offer an ideal location to look at the character and diverse roles of drugstores from the early 1800s onward. Although primarily associated with filling doctors’ prescriptions and selling medicines and other items for self-care, drugstores have long been virtually general stores selling an intriguing range of toiletries, perfumery, confectionery, seeds for the garden, and household needs.

In considering these mixt, various, universal stores, this account offers fascinating glimpses of shopping experiences, lifestyles, social situations, and health care.² Moreover, it highlights an intriguing paradox in the world of shopping in English-speaking countries, namely stores with a mix of professionalism and non–health care commerce. One druggist stated in 1930:

The position of the retail pharmacist is unique in the world of business. By reason of the fact that he not only dispenses drugs but sells advertised goods, he is not wholly a professional man; yet, on the other hand, in the sense that he is an adviser and confidant, as well as a seller of goods, he is not wholly a shopkeeper.³

Such a dichotomy, long a vexing issue for the pharmacy profession, became more acute as traditional dispensing practices faded relatively quickly afer World War II.⁴

Particular attention is given in chapters 1-4 to merchandise and medicines sold in Victorian Newfoundland, from which it is easy to appreciate subsequent changes (chapters 5 and 6). While existing writings about shopping mostly avoid details about merchandise sold (except for changes in women’s fashions), this account examines numerous products and services that encouraged shopping to become an experience for all classes of society. In this role, drugstores have had a place in the growth of consumerism, at least by providing a range of products, supported by advertising, that fed desires to emulate others and thus, at times, to purchase non-essential, maybe the latest, products. As part of the British Empire, Newfoundland did not escape the commerce and consumerism marking Victorian Britain. What was wanted was not needed.⁵

Even before the 1890s, when major department stores emerged in Newfoundland’s capital city of St. John’s, expensive perfumes and fancy soaps sold by Victorian druggists fostered daydreams, even desires, among many who could not afford such items.⁶ At the same time, druggists catered to all classes with inexpensive substitutes, some they prepared themselves. Likewise, the range of medicines they sold or prescribed, and their advice, provided a medical marketplace that has persisted, although not without changes, until the present.⁷

Chapter 5, in covering the period from around 1900 up to Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada in 1949, looks at business changes in stores. These were linked less to the introduction of compulsory education and licensing of druggists, than to the growth of and increased competition not only between drugstores, but also from a variety of others. Improving transport, mail, telephone and radio communication, and standards of living also played a part in facilitating shopping and impulse buying.

⁸

The last chapter reviews the relatively dramatic changes in the character of Newfoundland drugstores afer they embraced modernization, self-service, Canadian drug regulations, and the imprint of Canadian business, especially the supply of medicines. Previously, although colonial Newfoundland pharmacy avoided the same legislative and educational requirements as Britain, the drugstores were strongly influenced to use and sell British products, albeit with a significant infiltration from the U. S. and some from Canada.

For many years the shopping experiences of customers owed a good deal to the distinctive drugstore aura created by a store’s elegant wooden fixtures, rows of attractive glass containers, and a characteristic aroma arising from drugs and the preparations compounded on the premises. Many a Newfoundlander has remembered that up to the 1950s or so, they loved going to the drugstore, particularly for the smell of it, as they perhaps purchased the latest fashionable hair preparation or a medicine to maintain inner cleanliness.⁹ Reflections of such early drugstores are seen today in innumerable pharmacy museums—for instance, the James J. O’Mara Museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland (cf. Fig. 2)—which can prompt visitors to muse over change and progress. This may be about the advent of supermarket or big-box store pharmacies, or even large chain drugstores where one might first have to search for the dispensary at the back, on one side, or in the middle.

As readers ponder the striking changes that have taken place in drugstores over nearly 200 years, they may also wonder about the future of our pharmacies. With increasing public scrutiny of health care, challenging questions—some raised at the end of this account— are being asked about the nature and costs of dispensing medicines. Some questions relate to the extent the policies of large companies with multiple drugstores shape pharmacy services. Renowned artist Damien Hirst questioned pharmacy in an intriguing way through one of his installations: a room-size, walk-in pharmacy exhibited in a premier British art gallery, Tate Modern. With hundreds of empty medicine containers on the shelves to symbolize the selling power of commercial advertising and packaging, the installation asks the public to reflect on professional responsibilities in the sale of over-the-counter health care and related products.¹⁰

A variety of sources are used to tell this Newfoundland story, including numerous illustrations that help readers visualize shopping experiences and lifestyles. Unfortunately, large gaps exist in the records because of the relatively few stores on the island, the lack of encouragement to retain stock and account books, and the ravages of major fires in St. John’s, where the majority of the island’s drugstores were situated. However, where detail is lacking, many gaps can be filled from the patterns of commercial and professional services found throughout British and North American drugstores. It is abundantly clear, especially from the important resources of the O’Mara Pharmacy Museum, that Newfoundland closely followed the same patterns as in other parts of the British Empire while escaping the intensity of politics surrounding efforts to establish professional boundaries, as happened in Britain.¹¹

Newfoundland readers may be surprised by the richness of choices to be had in local drugstores even in Victorian times, or even by the relatively limited formal professional education of the island’s druggists compared with elsewhere until the 1980s.¹² On the other hand, readers in Britain, mainland Canada, and other former British colonies, and the United States, will find that the essentially local story told here has parallels elsewhere, while the questions raised about the future of pharmacy and health care are by no means limited to Canada. Moreover, the story spotlights the type of local circumstances that can modify general patterns. For instance, credit for customers was particularly important in Newfoundland given times of poor fishery, limited cash economy, and less than healthy lifestyles for many in a challenging geography and climate.

Unfortunately, no details have been uncovered on how individual druggists handled economic ups and downs, and how this impacted the bewildering range of merchandise they sold.¹³ Nor is there clear evidence of the implications of outbreaks of disease from time to time, although it must have led to a run on proprietary medicines, not only for such common conditions as flu and summer diarrhea, but also during the calamitous outbreaks of cholera in the 1800s and Spanish flu in 1918 that hit Newfoundland as elsewhere. It is clear, however, that, by and large, drugstores enjoyed long business lives in serving the needs, fancies, and whims of an island population.

1  Strictly, Shakespeare was describing an apothecary’s shop, but, as noted below, such shops transitioned to chemist and druggist shops in Britain, and the drugstore in North America.

2  The phrase mixt, various, universal, taken from a New York druggist’s 1784 advertisement, is used here to reflect that the miscellany of goods sold in drugstores was not only widespread, but also had a lengthy history. For the advertisement: D. L. Cowen, A Store Mixt, Various, Universal, Pharmacy in History, 1987: 29, 69-74.

3  W. G. Carter, Business Building for Pharmacists, London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1930, p. vii.

4  The tension is reflected in the title of a 1970s book, Pharmacy: A Profession in Search of a Role (by J. Robbins: Stamford: Navillus Publishing, 1979). Although focusing on the American scene, the same angst played out in Canada, Britain, and elsewhere.

5  The rise of consumerism in western societies is a complex, cross-class movement of which shopping and the availability of goods was only one factor, albeit a very important one. A large literature has emerged, some discussing the role of patent or quack cures, for instance, in terms of Britain, T. Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990; J. Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980, London: Longman, 1994; T. Ueyama, Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires and the Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. As the present account focuses on Newfoundland, it is noteworthy that Newfoundlanders were the first to witness a striking visual art exhibition at the Rooms Provincial Art Gallery; it urged a proactive consideration of the impact of consumer detritus on the planet: Nicola Hawkins, Junkosphere, exhibition catalogue, The Rooms, St. John’s, 2011.

6  For an account of the major department stores in St. John’s and their significance to shopping, C. J. Wheaton, ‘As modern as some of the fine new department stores . . . can make it.’ A Social History of the Large Water Street Stores, St. John’s, Newfoundland 1892-1949, Ph. D. Thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. (Thanks to Bert Riggs for drawing my attention to this.) For information on the names of businesses and shops in St. John’s, P. O’Neill, The Oldest City: The Story of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s: Boulder Publications, 2003, especially pp. 621-709.

The diverse nature of drugstores has been noted, if not explored in detail, many times; for one interesting perspective showing the appearance of drugstores in the U. S.: W. H. Helfand, The Design of American Pharmacies, 1865-1885, Pharmacy in History, 1994: 36, 26-37. For other North American issues, J. Collin, Entre Discours et Pratiques Les Médecins Montréalais Face à la Thérapeutique, 1869-1890, Revue d’Histoire de l’Amerique Francaise, 1999: 53, 61-92.

7  The notion of the medical marketplace has been debated by historians frequently since the 1980s, primarily to indicate that medical care from early modern times has been pluralistic, rather than solely in the hands of conventional practitioners. As such it impacted on relationships between patients and practitioners. Here the term indicates that the drugstore has had a key role in what can be called the democratization of health care, or the ready provision of inexpensive medical advice from druggists and a vast range of therapies.

8  Year Book and Almanac 1918, St. John’s: Withers, 1918, p. 77 for entry on O’Mara, and p. 29 for list of licensed stamp vendors.

9  The characteristic smell of drugstores was mentioned by many informants in the Healthways project; for background, R. R. Andersen, J. K. Crellin, B. O’Dwyer, Healthways: Newfoundland Elders: Their Lifestyles and Values, St. John’s: Creative Book Publishing, 1998.

10  For Tate Modern website information: < http://www.tate.org.uk/pharmacy/ > accessed January 2012.

11  James O’Mara Pharmacy Museum, Apothecary Hall Trust, St. John’s. An article, R. J. Clark, Professional Aspirations and the Limits of Occupational Autonomy: the Case of Pharmacy in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Canadian Bulletin Medical History, 1991: 8, 43-63), also reflects British issues in the nearby Dominion of Canada.

12  The limited formal education does not necessarily imply that druggists offered an inferior service, even though, as will be noted, it meant that their qualification did not allow them to practise elsewhere until new educational standards were available in 1986 (see Chapter 6).

13  One of the best-known Newfoundland issues with regards to the cash economy was the widespread practice of merchants supplying fishermen with gear and goods on credit to be repaid by fish catches. Although from 1858 anything over the loan had to be paid to fishermen in cash and not kind, abuses existed. Moreover, poor catches in some years led to variable income. For comment on the credit system, P. O’Flaherty, Lost Country: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland, 1843-1933, St. John’s: Long Beach Press, 2005, p. 5. For a sense of economic issues facing retail businesses: M. Baker, The Politics of Poverty: Providing Public Poor Relief in Nineteenth Century St. John’s, Newfoundland, in his