Joseph Price Remington was born on March 26, 1847 in Philadelphia, where for three generations his ancestors had been residents and members of the Society of Friends. His father was Dr. Isaac Remington, a well-known Philadelphia physician; his mother, Lydia, daughter of John Hart, who was a descendant of Townsend Speakman, an apothecary in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century.
After a preliminary training in the private and public schools of the city, he was graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1866. He received his early training at the hands of Charles Ellis, Dr. E. R. Squibb, Edward Parrish, and William Procter, the greatest American pharmacists of the nineteenth century.
After a few years of service with Dr. Squibb, and in the employ of the Powers, Weightman & Rosengarten Company, he successfully engaged in the retail drug business, also acting as assistant in pharmacy (1871 - 74) at the Philadelphia College.
In 1874 he succeeded Professor Procter in the chair of theory and practice of pharmacy; later he became also professor of operative pharmacy and director of the pharmaceutical laboratory, which he had been instrumental in establishing, equipping it in part at his own expense.
In 1893 he was made dean of the college. In the early eighties established a summer home on the then almost unpopulated beach below Atlantic City known as Longport, where he did most of his writing.
In 1878 he became one of the organizers and charter members of the Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Association, and, in 1879, one of the associate editors of the United States Dispensatory, a position which he held until his death. He gave up his retail business in 1885, and in that year published his great work, Practice of Pharmacy, which is probably the most widely known textbook on the subject in the world, having passed through six editions. Having joined the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1867, he served it in many capacities.
In 1887 he elaborated and secured the adoption of a plan for its reorganization by which the scientific work was divided into sections. That same year the Association appointed him as a delegate to visit the American Medical Association, and he induced that organization to establish a section of materia medica and pharmacy, which has since become the section of pharmacology and therapeutics. He served the Pharmaceutical Association as president (1892 - 93) and as secretary (1893 - 94).
He was president of the Seventh International Pharmaceutical Congress (1893), a delegate to the Pan-American Medical Congress (1893), and to the Second Congress in Mexico (1896); represented the United States in the Eighth International Pharmaceutical Congress at Brussels (1896) and was president of the pharmaceutical section of the Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry (1912).
His connection with the Pharmacopoeia began in 1877, when he served on an auxiliary committee of revision. Upon the death of Dr. Charles Rice, chairman of the revision committee, in 1901, Remington was made chairman, and was again elected in 1910, holding the position until his death. The ninth revision, issued in 1916, might be truly called his monument.
He was married in 1874 to Elizabeth Baily Collins, also of Quaker ancestry.
