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Sources and Resources ‘The People’s Chemists’: The Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive

Greenwood, Anna; Ingram, Hilary

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Authors

Anna Greenwood

Hilary Ingram



Abstract

This article explores the historic records of the Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) Archive, a repository of over 500,000 items chronicling the over 165-year history of Britain’s most famous pharmaceutical retailer. It introduces some of the diverse materials present in the collection that would be of interest to social historians of medicine and pharmacy, particularly highlighting resources pertinent to understanding developments in: the formation of pharmaceutical identity; medical advertising; the internationalisation of pharmaceutical and medical retailing; product research and development; and employee welfare. In the light of the recent launch of the first phase of the Boots online catalogue, the article demonstrates ways in which these records could be utilised to better understand the wider social, cultural and political dynamics at play in the development of medicine, health care and pharmacy in Britain over the long twentieth century.

Citation

Greenwood, A., & Ingram, H. (2018). Sources and Resources ‘The People’s Chemists’: The Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive. Social History of Medicine, 31(4), 857-869. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky021

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Apr 26, 2018
Publication Date Nov 1, 2018
Deposit Date Feb 20, 2019
Publicly Available Date Feb 20, 2019
Journal Social History of Medicine
Print ISSN 0951-631X
Electronic ISSN 1477-4666
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 31
Issue 4
Pages 857-869
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky021

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.




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