Sir Henry Soloman Wellcome, a key figure in the development of pharmaceutics and the promotion of medical research, was born to Yankee settlers on a hardscrabble farm in the vicinity of Almond, Wisconsin, where he spent the first eight years of his life. He moved to Minnesota with his family in 1861 and was later educated in pharmacy schools in Chicago and Philadelphia. In 1880 he went to London, England, where he and Silas Mainville Burroughs formed Burroughs Wellcome & Company to manufacture and market a new compressed form of American medicine: pills. He later established the Wellcome Chemical and Physiological laboratories, among the first medical research institutes in the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers associated with his work helped discover new treatments for diseases including diphtheria, yellow fever, malaria, leprosy, and sleeping sickness. His collection of rare medical manuscripts formed the basis for the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. A naturalized British citizen, he was knighted in 1932, and after his death in 1936 the Wellcome Trust in England became one of the world’s great benefactors of medical research, while the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in the United States has supported medical research since 1955.