Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [106]
The following year, the Pennsylvania State Board of Health dispatched one of its own bacteriologists, Dr. R. L. Pitfield, to inspect American vaccine farms. Of the fourteen farms Pitfield visited, he could recommend only four. Amidst the wildly various production standards, Pitfield found a common ground of rank commercialism and “a tenacious adherence to original and old and rather preaseptic measures.” In one Missouri establishment, a worker used his own fingernail to remove the crust; in another, the heifers were kept in a “dusty and dirty apartment,” with urine streaming in from the operating room on the floor above them. Even at the New York City Health Department, one of America’s leading scientific establishments, Pitfield found “the accommodations are not as good as they should be.” Among the many troubling statements in Dr. Pitfield’s detailed report was this one: “In many establishments, tetanus bacilli might find their way to the vesicle and thence to the points and tubes, because dust in large quantities abounds in the incubating stables.”46
In the late 1890s, American vaccine makers adopted a new production technique that reduced the problem of bacteria-ridden vaccine. For decades, European makers had added glycerin to their product to keep it from decomposing. In 1891, the Englishman Sydney Monckton Copeman established that glycerin not only preserved vaccine but gradually killed unwanted bacteria without damaging the virus. Glycerin also acted as a diluent, allowing makers to stretch lymph and thus greatly increase the number of vaccine units that could be produced from a single calf. By 1898, glycerinated calf lymph had become the international standard of vaccine, widely preferred by the leading local, state, and federal health officers in the United States.47
While some companies (such as the Martin Vaccine Farm and the Washington, D.C.–based National Vaccine Establishment) still dealt chiefly or exclusively in smallpox vaccines, other industry leaders had a much larger footprint in the marketplace. Firms like Parke, Davis and Wyeth Company sold a growing number of biological products as well as compounded drugs of almost infinite variety. Even as firms opened branch houses in major U.S. cities and overseas, their vaccine lines required that they keep one foot planted on the farm. H. K. Mulford Company, one of America’s most reputable manufacturers of biologics and drugs, still adorned its vaccine ads in 1901 with a healthy heifer standing contentedly by a gentle stream and thought nothing of running those vaccine ads directly beneath another for pint bottles of “Mulford’s Pre-Digested Beef.” That both products might come from precisely the same source was a fact worth publicizing. Field, laboratory, and slaughterhouse were stages of an industrial life cycle that bound urban life, as ever, to the domestication of rural animals and landscapes.48
For the H. K. Mulford Company, “Manufacturing Chemists,” a newcomer to the vaccine market in 1898, dealing in biologics meant reversing the expected American trajectory. Mulford was born in the city and moved to the country. The company got its start in the late 1880s when twenty-one-year-old Henry K. Mulford bought the “Old Simes” corner drugstore in downtown Philadelphia. At first, Mulford seemed poised to follow the conventional road of the entrepreneur in Philadelphia’s robust drug trade, the largest in the United States outside of New York. He introduced his own line of medical preparations, including elixirs, lozenges, liquors, tinctures, antiseptics, and soda fountain syrups. In 1891, with new financial backing, Mulford incorporated and began its swift transformation from retail druggist to nationally prominent manufacturing firm. Henry Mulford