💊The Greats

Appointed chief of herbalists by the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil in Cairo, Ibn al-Baytar took his student Ibn Abi Usaybi'a — later medicine's great biographer — plant-hunting around Damascus. The student recorded their method: they read Dioscorides and Galen against the living plants in front of them, and his teacher would recite any passage from memory, correcting the thousand-year-old Greek text wherever the specimen in his hand disagreed with it. He died in Damascus in 1248, reportedly poisoned by a plant he was testing.

Scheele had isolated and described oxygen — his 'fire air' — by around 1773, but his publisher sat on the manuscript of his book until 1777, three years after Joseph Priestley published his own independent discovery, costing the apothecary priority for the most important substance he ever found. He refused invitations to grander scientific posts, including from Frederick the Great's Berlin, preferring to keep his pharmacy; his lifelong habit of tasting and smelling every new compound — including hydrogen cyanide, whose flavor he described — likely contributed to his death at 43.

In 1817, to prove morphine's potency, Sertürner and three young friends each swallowed what he later reported as three doses totaling around 100 milligrams within an hour — many times what medicine now considers a safe first dose. All four collapsed into life-threatening stupor, and Sertürner, barely conscious, induced vomiting with vinegar to save them. His published account of the near-disaster convinced the scientific establishment; Gay-Lussac had the work translated into French, and in 1831 the Institut de France awarded Sertürner its Montyon Prize as a benefactor of humanity.

Having isolated quinine, Pelletier and Caventou published their extraction method in full and deliberately took no patent, stating that the discovery belonged to the public. Quinine factories opened across Europe within a few years, and malaria treatment shifted from unreliable powdered bark to a dosable pure drug. The Institut de France awarded the pair its Montyon Prize of 10,000 francs in 1827; Paris later raised a public monument to them on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in 1900, an honor few pharmacists have ever received.

In 1885 Nagai isolated ephedrine from má huáng, the Ephedra herb Chinese medicine had prescribed for coughs and wheezing for two thousand years — a direct chemical vindication of a traditional remedy. The discovery then sat largely unused for four decades until 1920s researchers at Eli Lilly, following work by K. K. Chen on the same herb, established ephedrine as a standard asthma treatment worldwide. Nagai's career made him the bridge over which European laboratory pharmacy entered Japan: he helped draft the country's first pharmacopoeia and trained its first generations of pharmaceutical chemists.

Chaulmoogra oil helped leprosy patients but was nearly unusable — too thick to inject, too nauseating to swallow. In 1915–16 Ball isolated the oil's ethyl esters, producing a water-miscible injectable form. She died in December 1916, aged 24, before publishing; the college's president, Arthur Dean, continued the work and published it as the 'Dean Method' without crediting her. A 1922 paper by Harry Hollmann, the physician who had recruited her, restored the name 'Ball Method'. The treatment freed isolated patients to go home, and remained the standard until sulfone antibiotics in the 1940s. Hawaii now marks Alice Ball Day every fourth February 29.

Screening more than 2,000 traditional remedies for the military's malaria project, Tu's team found qinghao (Artemisia annua) promising but maddeningly inconsistent. The answer came from a fourth-century text: Ge Hong's Emergency Formulas advised soaking the fresh herb in cold water and wringing out the juice — no boiling. Realizing heat was destroying the active compound, Tu switched to low-temperature ether extraction, and in 1971 extract number 191 achieved complete inhibition of malaria parasites in mice. Before patient trials in 1972, she and two colleagues took the extract themselves to prove it safe.