Page 34 - Pharmacy History 37 Nov 2009

Vaseline:
from trademark word to English noun
Peter G Homan FRPharmS
The history
Petroleum products have been used medicinally for centuries. Marco Polo travelling through Baku, Azerbaijan, found that petroleum oil was used there to treat diseased camels.1
James’ Dispensatory, 17472, describes ‘petroleum (oleum de saxo, naphtha, oleum petrae, oil of Peter, or rock oil) a fat liquid substance, of a
black colour, and a strong smell’. It varied greatly according to the place and country where it was found. A black, foul-smelling bitumen from Galbia in the Languedoc region of France was ‘an antihysteric; and also good for the tooth-ach [sic]’. Oil of Babylon (naphtha of diascorides)
was described as an inflammable petroleum. ‘Petroleum of Brittany given a few drops at a time, with great success in what is called a suffocation of the uterus, and to kill worms in children’.
The story of Vaseline starts in 1859. In Pennsylvania, the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company was a pioneer in the manufacture of oil products, selling them under the trade mark of Luxor. Robert Augustus Chesebrough (1837-1933) was a chemist with the company and was interested in the possibilities of using oil products medicinally. In the oil field he noticed that workers were applying a sticky substance that had adhered to their drills, to cuts and
Robert Augustus Chesebrough (1837-1933)
burns in order to heal them. This substance was known as ‘rod wax’. Chesebrough set about refining rod wax using heat and filtration until he produced the first petroleum jelly. He named the substance Vaseline, from the German word wasser (water) and the Greek word olion (oil) in the belief that the substance was formed by the decomposition of water in
the earth. He patented the process
of refining and marketed Vaseline
in 1868. The refining process is achieved by passing the heated raw material through filters of animal charcoal, white Vaseline having
been filtered more times than the yellow. The white version has a stiffer composition.
The next venture was to introduce Vaseline to the general public and extol its virtues which included the treatment of burns, abrasions and chapping, plus many household
uses. At first the advertising and the distribution of the product was by dispatching salesmen with horses and carts all over America.
Vaseline was patented in America
in 1872 and in England in 1877.
By the late 1880s it was said that,
in America, Chesebrough was
selling one jar per minute. At the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, it was awarded the Grand Medal for ‘novelty, great value in pharmacy, unequalled purity and superiority of manufacture’. The Paris Exposition of 1878 gave it a silver medal.3
The official product
Chesebrough first introduced the product to scientific and medical institutes as a curative and soothing agent and as a base for many products such as ointments and cosmetics. Until this time ointment bases had been based on animal and vegetable fats which would go rancid and decompose. Vaseline was totally
stable, an ideal base to incorporate medicaments and easily applied. In 1876 the Lancet published a comment on Vaseline which it also called gelatum petroleum (petroleum jelly)4:
34 Pharmacy History Australia
volume 5 no 37 NOVEMBER 2009