What's in a name? Henry Dale and adrenaline, 1906

Abstract

By the beginning of the twentieth century the use of widespread advertising, trade names, and specialized marketing techniques was a distinctive feature of the commercial world.These attributes were well developed in the trade in medicines, a field that ranged from quack cures and secret remedies through proprietary brands to "ethical pharmacy".1The British pharmaceutical firm, Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. had, by that time, achieved considerable success in promoting itself as an ethical company guided by scientific principles and remote from the quackery and chicanery of pill peddlers and nostrummongers.A component of that ethical behaviour was the maintenance of their own production and advertising standards and the proper recognition of others' commercial rights.In the final decade of the nineteenth century Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. had established quasi-independent laboratories, the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories (WPRL), in which physiologists and pharmacologists were employed to undertake basic research not directly or necessarily associated with the company's commercial enterprises.One such scientist was the future Nobel Laureate Henry Dale, who in 1906 wished to publish a paper in which the word "adrenaline" appeared.2This was then the commonly accepted term, within Britain's physiological community, for the active principle of the suprarenal gland.However, the word "Adrenalin" was a registered trademark of the American pharmaceutical firm Parke, Davis & Co., and Dale's intended use was forbidden by Henry Wellcome.Dale and his colleagues refused to accept this injunction, and the ensuing debates raised important issues within the Wellcome

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