Am.^Tour.^Pharm.  j       fj%e  u .  x.  Mulford  Company.  367 
prosperity  kept  their  heads  and  grown  nearer  each  to  the  other  in 
trust  and  friendship,  it  becomes  apparent  that  the  celebration  of  the 
twenty-fifth  anniversary  of  their  business  career  is  a  red-letter  day 
indeed. 
It  is  proper  at  this  time  to  review  the  work  of  the  company  dur- 
ing its  adolescence  in  order  to  determine  to  what  extent  the  am- 
bitions of  the  past  have  become  the  attainments  of  the  present. 
The  success  has  been  undoubted,  almost  unprecedented  in  the 
history  of  manufacturing  pharmacy.  The  acorn  of  1891  is  the 
sturdy  oak  of  191 6,  and  it  becomes  us  to  seek  the  cause  of  this 
continued  and  rapid  growth.  We  believe  the  answer  may  be  found 
in  a  single  word — service. 
The  firm  has  from  the  first  day  conducted  its  business  with  a 
determination  of  doing  it  as  well  as  possible,  believing  that  more 
than  a  business — a  trust — had  been  committed  to  the  care  and  guid- 
ance of  its  members.  For  some  years  the  H.  K.  Mulford  Company 
was  engaged  in  the  manufacture  of  pharmaceutical  preparations 
only,  and  the  improvements  instituted  in  the  production  of  com- 
pressed and  friable  tablets,  effervescent  salts,  elixirs  (at  one  time  a 
leading  specialty),  fluid  and  solid  extracts,  tinctures  and  ointments 
gave  prominence  to  these  productions  of  the  firm  at  an  early  period 
of  its  history,  and  the  Keystone  label  became  recognized  as  the 
standard  of  quality.  At  the  time  of  which  we  are  now  writing  it 
was  the  custom  to  throw  a  veil  of  secrecy  around  the  formula  and 
preparation  of  pharmaceutical  specialties  and  to  claim  virtues  for 
them  that  existed  only  in  the  imagination  of  their  proprietors. 
The  H.  K.  Mulford  Company,  recognizing  that  pharmacy  was 
but  a  department  of  the  science  and  art  of  medicine ;  realizing  its  re- 
sponsibilities to  the  medical  profession  and  the  public ;  believing 
itself  bound  by  the  Hippocratic  Oath,  and,  regarding  medical  ethics 
as  a  unity,  one  and  indivisible,  placed  the  formula  of  every  prepara- 
tion on  its  container  and  confined  its  statements  to  quotations  from 
physicians,  who  prescribed  them.  Here  as  always  decency  had  its 
reward. 
While  the  work  of  the  Mulford  laboratories  in  pharmacy  and 
pharmacology  alone  would  entitle  the  firm  to  the  very  highest  stand- 
ing, it  did  not  remain  content  with  those  spheres  of  activity,  and 
in  the  year  1894  instituted  the  first  commercial  laboratory  in  the 
United  States  for  the  preparation  of  biological  remedies. 
The  first  product  of  the  new  laboratories  was  diphtheria  anti- 
