Medicine: Drugs Without Soda

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A great druggist died last week. A swatch of black crepe hung over the picture of little, round-faced Dr. J. Leon Lascoff in the Manhattan drugstore he founded in 1899. He was the dean of the old-fashioned U.S. pharmacists — the proud little group to whom a soda fountain and its attendant Comus' crew are anathema.

Leeches for Fighters. In his saddened shop, a remodeled brownstone house on upper Lexington Avenue, twelve expert elixir and pill makers kept busy filling a stream of prescriptions which has now passed the 1,280,000 mark. Unlike most modern drugstores, J. Leon Lascoff & Son sells nothing but chemicals, prescriptions, biologicals and a few special cosmetics. Within these limits, Lascoff's pride is to keep everything ("if we don't have it, nobody does")—e.g., a large, dignified, white porcelain jar of leeches, a commodity still in some demand for pugilists' shiners, stands just inside the door.

No cut-rate posters sully the Lascoff windows—each has its traditional jewel-colored globe of tinted water, many of them museum pieces. The shop itself is museumlike. One wall is covered by part of Dr. Lascoff's collection of herbal prescription jars, bottles, mortars and pestles, some of which date back to alchemists of the Middle Ages. A tiny gallery is lined with cabinets of rare drugs, books and neatly arranged antique scales and measures. Behind two neat enamel benches there begins the largest drugstore library in the U.S. The 1,000-odd volumes are in many languages.

Old-Fashioned Man. Dr. Lascoff was born in Vilna, Poland (then Russia) in 1867 and got his education there. He came to the U.S. in 1892. In the Prince Albert coat and high silk hat that European chemists wore in those days, he began compounding prescriptions for Manhattan's Hayes & Son at $2 a week. He was raised to $10 before the week was up.

Dr. Lascoff's special gift to his profession was his recipes—to a pharmacist, a recipe is not a combination of drugs (that is the physician's province) but the method of making the combination hang together. Dr. Lascoff collected recipes old and new, developed many of his own. He was on the U.S. Pharmacopoeia's committee for the last four editions (a new one is published every ten years), started and edited the American Pharmaceutical Association's Recipe Book through three editions, and edited Drug Topics' column of advice to druggists.

Dr. Frederick Lascoff. who succeeds his father, is his spit and image, but bigger.