John Uri Lloyd: The Great American Eclectic

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Summary: John Uri Lloyd, influential pharmaceutical pioneer.
Review: Michael A. Flannery has written the first full-length biography of John Uri Lloyd (1849-1936), the man generally accepted as one of America's most influential pharmaceutical pioneers. A most intelligent, readable and enlightening work, Flannery takes the reader deep into the philosophy of the eclectics who emerged in response to the then current harsh therapies of physicians. The eclectics worked to replace the horrors of bloodletting & chemical treatments with more reasoned and effective botanical remedies derived from natural sources. Lloyd's story and research center in Cincinnati, Ohio where in 1871 he was hired to develop a line of botanical tinctures, 'Specified Medicines', for the eclectic drug wholesaler H.M.Merrell. Lloyd developed more and refined botanical drugs as well as original research in fluidextracts, formulated means for assaying, and discovered a buffering compound, known later as Lloyd's Reagent. His professional and personal library of rare! and highly valuable pharmaceutical and botanical texts formed the base for an internationally renown library,located in Cincinnati,for scholars and researchers . Prof. Flannery, director of the Lloyd Library, writes touchingly yet objectively of a great man at the center of an important movement in pharmaceutical research and history.