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For anyone facing surgery, the possibility of pain looms large. Imagine back to a time when options for “anesthesia” were limited to alcohol or the danger of opium. When a Boston dentist demonstrated the “power of ether” back in 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Jospeh Warren – a well-respected surgeon…
Read More »With the election just three weeks away, I started thinking about the last presidential election and discovered that I had not added those results to our “elections” page. I’ll put them there now, but here they are in case you’re interested: 2008 Election Results In Massachusetts in 2008, the presidential…
Read More »In the years before the Civil War, Eli Hoyt was joined by another teenager as employees at Staniel’s drug store. His name was Freeman Ballard Shedd. Shedd was born in Lowell in 1844 and, after working in the drug store for a couple of years, enlisted in the Union Army…
Read More »Although not medicine, another product that emerged from a Lowell drug store was Hoyt’s German Cologne. Eli W. Hoyt was born in Alexandria, New York in 1838. Eli came with his parents to Lowell when he was eight, attended the local school before starting work at thirteen years as a…
Read More »Congratulations to Franco American School Principal Lorraine Richard, SCQ, Director of Development Colleen Tully and the Board of Directors of the Franco American School, former state Sen. Steven Panagiokos, and all the generous craftspeople and donors for the extraordinary restoration of the Way of the Cross at the Grotto of…
Read More »The world premiere of Jack Kerouac’s play “Beat Generation” made news coast to coast and around the world this week. Among the media outlets that published articles and reviews or broadcast reports were the Associated Press, Rolling Stone, WBUR and WGBH radio in Boston, the Sun, Howl in Lowell and…
Read More »The second in my series on the patent medicine industry in Lowell: James Cook Ayer was born in 1818 in Groton, Connecticut and moved to Lowell at age thirteen where he served as apprentice in James Robbins’s apothecary shop on Lowell and also studied medicine under the tutelage of Dr.…
Read More »The Lowell Historical Society announced that the Edson Cemetery Tour scheduled for this Saturday October 13th has been postponed. Kim Zunino who designed the tour is unable to guide the tour so it will be rescheduled to another weekend. We will post the information here when available.
Read More »The world premiere of Jack Kerouac’s only full-length play, “Beat Generation,” drew a standing ovation from the opening night crowd last night at Merrimack Repertory Theatre. The production is a language fest with all the mundane and sublime elements that are expected in Kerouac’s writing. The play jumped off the…
Read More »Recent news about the “compounding pharmacy” that provided tainted drugs that have now led to dozens of cases of meningitis got me thinking about the US Pharmaceutical Industry which had its roots in Lowell, a national leader in medicine production in nineteenth century America. One of the largest manufacturers was…
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