The Rise of Private Laboratories and Agricultural Stations

after 1876, growing numbers of chemistry students started to populate the university laboratories, it became increasingly clear that the stream of graduates could not be absorbed by the labour market for school teachers. A large unemployment crisis did not occur though, because at the same time new employment options emerged.  

One of these labour markets was agriculture. When fertilizer use expanded, there was a growing need to analyse the quality and the amounts of nutrients of the commercial fertilizers. In 1877 Dutch government established the first official Rijkslandbouwproefstation (State Agricultural Experimental Station) at Wageningen, and from 1889 onwards four additional experimental stations followed where several academic chemists found employ.  

The laboratories were not the exclusive realm of academic chemists. Also technologists from Delft Polytechnic and, especially, pharmacists found employ in private analytical laboratories. In 1889, the Pharmaceutical Society (NMBP) started a campaign to stipulate that the members of the society would connect an analytical laboratory to their pharmacy shop. The analysis of drinking water and foodstuff s was considered to be a domain on which pharmacists could and should be active successfully. An investigation executed by the NMBP the same year showed that of 145 Dutch municipalities in which there was a pharmacy shop, there were 58 in which the local pharmacist also analysed foodstuff s.  

During the following decades this area of activity certainly became a contested terrain between chemists and pharmacists, and numerous boundary conflicts resulted from it. When in late 1898 the new pharmaceutical laboratory of Leiden University was opened, the professor of pharmacy and toxicology, 

Hendrik Wijsman, held a lecture in which he emphasized the important role that pharmacists should play in the analysis of foodstuffs, fertilizers and numerous other commodities. Shortly afterwards, he was heavily attacked by C. A. Lobry de Bruyn, professor of organic and pharmaceutical chemistry at Amsterdam, who argued in a long letter in the Pharmaceutisch Weekblad (Pharmaceutical Weekly) that pharmacists should fully concentrate on their pharmacist shops, and not enter domains such as the analysis of foodstuffs, for which chemists had been trained far more thoroughly and extensively. In the weeks that followed a true polemic was fought in the columns of the Pharmaceutisch WeekladP 

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