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Though foreign visitors might be surprised to hear it, U.S. drugstores also sell drugs. They sell quite a lot of drugs. More than twelve times every second — almost 400 million times a year — some worried citizen peers down the length of one of the nation's 50,000 drugstores — past the lunch counter, the toys, the plastic raincoats, the hair lotions and tooth powders — and finally catches sight of the little glass booth marked "Prescriptions." To the pharmacist in the booth he hands a slip of paper marked with the magical device, "Ŗ" the name of a drug and a few cabalistic symbols squiggled in abbreviated Latin. A few minutes later, the customer walks out of the drugstore again, confident that he has been given just what the doctor ordered.
That confidence, and the enormous in crease in the nation's prescription business (up 350% in the last ten years), reflect a revolution in U.S. medicine. In stead of writing a shotgun formula requiring half a dozen ingredients,* a doctor can now prescribe a single-bullet remedy, neatly packaged in advance, its purity guaranteed by the maker. Two-thirds of the drugs most commonly prescribed to day did not even exist 20 years ago. In place of the citrates and tartrates, the nux vomica and monkshood of an earlier day, the druggists' rows of glass-stoppered bottles are now filled with one or another of the long line of new "wonder drugs": the sulfas, the antibiotics, the hormones.
Back from Mephistopheles. To a large extent, this revolution was brought about by the big drug manufacturers who pour out the wonder drugs from their assembly-line factories, translating the discoveries of the laboratory into jars on the druggists' shelves. Only a generation ago, the drug industry was barely tolerated by "pure" researchers in science and medicine, who were apt to consider it as undesirable an employer as Mephistopheles. Now that attitude has completely changed. For their part, as the essential middlemen of the medical revolution, the drugmakers have accepted the fact that they are in business for other people's health. "Medicine is for the patient," says Merck & Co.'s Chairman George W. Merck. "Medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits."
Chairman Merck's own company is not quite the biggest U.S. manufacturer of "ethical" drugs.* Its 1951 sales of $120 million (plus $10 million in Canada) were topped by Parke, Davis & Co.'s $138 million. But Merck is one of the oldest (its roots go back to the Germany of 1668), its main lines are the four new classes of drugs (vitamins, sulfas, antibiotics and hormones), and its products reach every corner of the U.S. and the world.