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Daniel B. Smith was an American pharmacist, philanthropist, and educator. He was also an originator of the Apprentices' Library.
Background
He was born on July 14, 1792 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Benjamin Smith and Deborah (Morris) Smith, and a descendant of Daniel Smith who emigrated from Bramham, Yorkshire, England, to New Jersey in 1691, one of the first of several brothers who settled there.
Smith's baptismal certificate gives his name simply as Daniel; he evidently inserted the initial later. When Daniel was about a year old his father died, and his mother moved to Burlington, New Jersey.
Education
In Burlington he attended the school conducted by John Griscom, a distinguished Quaker educator, who had a liking for the sciences. It was his influence, no doubt, that led young Smith to take up pharmacy as a career.
Career
After leaving school he returned to Philadelphia and entered the drug store of John Biddle on Market Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets. On the completion of his term of apprenticeship, he was taken into partnership under the firm name of Biddle & Smith.
In 1819 he opened his own store at the corner of Arch and Sixth Streets. In 1828 he took in William Hodgson, Jr. , a young English apothecary, as a partner, and the firm thus established remained in existence until 1849, when the property was sold. He served as secretary of Philadelphia College of Pharmacy 1821-27; as vice-president, 1828; as president, 1829-54; and as chairman of the committee on publications.
On March 28, 1826, about nine months after he assumed this chairmanship, there was published the first issue of the Journal of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (later the American Journal of Pharmacy).
His early business life as an apothecary was contemporaneous with an era of great progress in chemistry and pharmacy, and he took a keen interest in the various discoveries made, reading the foreign reports as soon as they became available. His interest in these records of progress was scientific rather than commercial, and was not limited to the field of pharmacy and chemistry.
Having a strong interest in education and in social problems, he was one of the corporators of the Philadelphia Savings Fund, 1819; of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1826, of which he was the first corresponding secretary, and of the House of Refuge, 1828. He was actively associated with the Franklin Institute.
In 1834 he accepted the chair of moral philosophy, English literature, and chemistry at Haverford School (later College), where he taught for twelve years. During this time he prepared and published The Principles of Chemistry for the Use of Schools, Academies and Colleges (1837) and numerous lectures on ethics, and the lives and doctrines of the early members of the Society of Friends.
He resigned his position at Haverford in 1846 to return to the practice of pharmacy, from which he did not retire fully until 1853. In 1849 he removed to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where he lived until his death.