The Upjohn Pill and the Medicine That Crumbles
Near Kalamazoo, Michigan
In eighteen eighty-five, a Kalamazoo physician named William Upjohn applied for a patent on a new kind of pill. The idea was simple and radical: a pill you could crush between your thumb and index finger. He called it the friable pill.
The problem he was solving was real. In the nineteenth century, doctors who wanted to give patients medication in solid form had two options: liquid extracts of inconsistent potency, or pills so hard they could be hammered into a board without cracking. Those hard pills frequently passed through the digestive system without dissolving at all. They did not work, except as expensive ballast.
Upjohn's marketing approach was as memorable as his chemistry. He printed pine boards and mailed them to physicians across the country, along with a sample of a competitor's hard pill and one of his own friable pills, and an invitation to hammer them. The friable pill crumbled. The competitor's pill left a dent in the board. Doctors remembered that demonstration.
He and his brother Henry founded the Upjohn Pill and Granule Company in Kalamazoo in eighteen eighty-six. By the end of that first year they employed twelve workers, manufactured one hundred eighty-six different medicinal formulas, and had outgrown their original basement space on Farmer's Alley. The thumb crushing a pill into powder became the company's trademark symbol for the next sixty years.
Upjohn went on to develop cortisone, prednisone, Rogaine, and Xanax over the following decades, becoming a global pharmaceutical company and one of the largest employers in southwest Michigan. In nineteen ninety-five it merged with the Swedish firm Pharmacia. In two thousand three, Pfizer absorbed the combined company. The Kalamazoo research campus remained active for years after, though the Upjohn name gradually disappeared from the signs.
What William Upjohn understood in eighteen eighty-five was that medicine people could not absorb was not medicine at all. That insight, combined with the willingness to prove it with a hammer and a pine board, built one of the great American pharmaceutical dynasties from a basement in this city.
