Background
Élie Magloire Durand, usually known in America as Elias Durand, was born on January 25, 1794, at Mayenne, France, the youngest of the fourteen children of Andre Durand, the local recorder of deeds.
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Élie Magloire Durand, usually known in America as Elias Durand, was born on January 25, 1794, at Mayenne, France, the youngest of the fourteen children of Andre Durand, the local recorder of deeds.
At school Durand developed an aptitude for chemistry; and in October 1808 he was apprenticed to a M. Chevallier, a distinguished chemist and pharmacist of the city, who won his pupil's enduring gratitude by giving him thorough, systematic instruction in laboratory technique and in the elements of the physical and biological sciences. Twenty years later Durand repaid his master in the only way possible, by giving the same excellent instruction to his own apprentices in Philadelphia. By a year's study in Paris, Durand completed his scientific training.
Durand was commissioned as a pharmacist in the French army, February 2, 1813, and was assigned to the 3rd Division of the V Corps. He was present at the battles of Mockern, Letzen, Bautzen, Hanau, the Katzbach and Leipzig. He was captured at Hanau but was released almost immediately by a Prussian officer aghast at the losses sustained by his enemy. Durand resigned his commission on April 3, 1814, and secured congenial employment at Nantes, returned to the army for the "Hundred Days, " and went back to Nantes after Waterloo.
Because of his Napoleonic sympathies, however, he was kept under surveillance and required to report himself every morning to the police. Unable to brook such restraint any longer, he determined to emigrate. He sailed from Nantes on April 16, 1816, in the brig La Nymphe and landed at New York the first of July. For the next few years his life was somewhat nomadic. In Boston he was kindly received by his distant relative, Bishop John Lefebre de Cheverus, was introduced to various men of science, and was employed by a druggist named Perkins to manufacture Rochelle salt, tartar emetic, ether, and other drugs according to French methods.
In Philadelphia he worked for a German, Wesener, who was making chromates and mercurial salts, but the salts affected his health, and he was compelled to quit. During a three months' stay at Bel Air, Maryland, he studied English assiduously. For one winter he lived with Gerard Troost at Cape Sable, Md. Troost, all alone except for his Negro laborers, was engaged in manufacturing copperas and was starved for civilized company.
Although he had no employment to offer him, he insisted vehemently that Durand stay with him anyway. Finally, in Baltimore in 1817, Durand entered into partnership with his compatriot and fellow pharmacist, Edme Ducatel. In Baltimore, during these years, he began his study of American flora. Withdrawing from the partnership in 1824, he went to France to purchase apparatus and supplies and in 1825 opened a drug store at the corner of Sixth and Chestnut Sts. , in Philadelphia. Resplendent with huge French bottles and other heavy glassware, porcelain jars, mahogany drawers, and marble counters, the shop instantly became fashionable. There was more to it, however, than glitter. Its proprietor, possessing skill and knowledge of a high order, regarded pharmacy as no mere trade but as a learned profession and a public trust.
He collected a valuable professional library and took in a number of foreign scientific journals. He introduced to the medical men of the city a long list of foreign medicines, previously unused in the United States, and originated a number of others. Some of these medicines were suggested first by Dr. Samuel Jackson.
By putting up some of the prescriptions as proprietary remedies with Jackson's name on the labels Durand unintentionally involved his friend in a question of professional ethics. He was also the first to bottle mineral water in this country and invented a machine for bottling it under pressure. Attracted by his social qualities, the physicians of Philadelphia used Durand's Drug Store as an informal clubhouse. Ultimately Durand's example affected the drug business of the entire country. Botanists as well as physicians were attracted to his store. He advanced money to many a botanical traveler and often accepted their collections in payment. It was in this way that he acquired Thomas Nuttall's herbarium.
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque's he discovered, somewhat the worse for rats, in an old loft and bought it for a small sum. He himself explored the Dismal Swamp of Virginia in 1837 and the mountains of Pennsylvania in 1862 and made numerous shorter excursions with Joseph Bonaparte, then living at Bordentown, New Jersey, and with other scientific friends.
He was elected to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences (1825), the College of Pharmacy (1825, vice-president 1844), and the American Philosophical Society (1854).
In 1860 he went to France for a second time and also visited England. In 1868 he took to Paris his own herbarium, containing over 10, 000 species and over 100, 000 specimens, and presented it to the museum of the Jardin des Plantes, where it was housed in a special gallery as the Herbier Durand. During his retirement he also rearranged and from his own collections supplemented the herbarium of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He gave his botanical library to the Academy and his chemical and pharmaceutical works, together with a herbarium of medical plants, to the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He had previously given the College a general herbarium of 12, 000 specimens.
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Durand was a member of the American Philosophical Society (1854).
Durand was a good Latin scholar. His English was always French in accent and occasionally in idiom, but he wrote the language fluently and well. He was noted for his charities and for his helpful kindness to younger scientists.
On November 20, 1820, Durand married Polymnia Rose Ducatel, the daughter of his Baltimore friend. She died February 18, 1822.
On October 25, 1825, about the time when he established himself in Philadelphia, he married Marie Antoinette Berauld, whose father, a merchant of Norfolk, Virginia, was one of the French refugees from the Santo Domingo Insurrection. Her death in 1851 led Durand, in the following year, to make his business over to his son and to give the rest of his life to botanical studies.