An eagle fills the page, and under its wing, where another campaign would have put a factory, there is a globe wrapped in a paper band: «create the new medicament and spread it through the world». Then, in small type, the part that actually dates the sheet — the price list of 1930s pharmacology.
The banner across the top reads «FORZE DEL LAVORO ITALIANO PER L’AUTARCHIA», the fullest version of the series slogan found on these sheets. The eagle is drawn in the monumental mode, feathers like roof tiles; at its feet the Carlo Erba roundel — the CE monogram ringed by «CARLO ERBA MILANO» — radiates light over a small modernist factory block. The right-hand column lists «recent achievements of the scientific laboratories of the house», and at the foot, white on black: CARLO ERBA S.A. MILANO.
The oldest name in Italian pharmaceuticals
Carlo Erba was founded in Milan in 1853 by the pharmacist whose name it kept, and it was the first pharmaceutical industry in Italy — for decades the country’s principal one. By the late 1930s it was a house with laboratories worth advertising, and this sheet advertises nothing else: no single product is drawn, no packet shown. The eagle and the globe carry the rhetoric; the product list carries the substance.
A sheet dated by its own chemistry
Read closely, the list is a snapshot of where pharmacology stood at the end of the 1930s: Derganil and Piridin Derganil, sulphonamide preparations — the drug class that had only existed since the middle of the decade; Chemiochin, described on the sheet as a synthetic antimalarial; Neodigal, digitalis glycosides; Valedene, valerian; Betasteril, synthetic vitamin B; vitamin E, and vitamin P.P., the anti-pellagra factor. Sulphonamides and synthetic vitamins on one page put the sheet in the last years of the decade as surely as a printed date would — the campaign slogan does the rest. In the upper left corner sits the small circular agency monogram that recurs across the series, read by the collector as the mark of the Milanese concessionaire IGAP; the scan is too small to confirm it, and the sheet is published without an attribution.
About this image. The work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author. Since the author has not been identified, that term cannot be considered expired, and the image is treated as fully protected. It is reproduced here for documentation, study and critical purposes only, under Art. 70 of L. 633/1941 and the fair-use provision of 17 U.S.C. §107. The scan was made by the collector from his own copy of the sheet, part of the period material he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical sheet is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale, no reproduction rights are granted, and any request concerning the work should be addressed to the rights holders. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
Sources
- Carlo Erba — foundation in Milan in 1853, the first and principal Italian pharmaceutical industry
- The sheet itself, for the slogan, the product list and the agency monogram.
