Working Titles

Synthetische Farbstoffe was the name under which Futhark Medicine Providers begin as a dyer of cloth back in 1859, in Ludwigshafen, Germany on the banks of the Rhine.  Not unlike Paradese’s acquisition of DiaComp, twenty seven years later it acquired Verband Und Mull, a medical supply company whose home was in Basel, Switzerland.  As “colonialism” and “imperialism” had not yet earned their twentieth century negative associations, war was how nations expanded their territory and their influence.  And those paying the cost with their bodies needed dressings and all manner of things that could be made and sold to the princes who waged the battles of this world.

Herr Anton von Falk, the owner and founder of Verband, sold to Istvan Futhark when Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, pulled back from distant colonial conflicts.  It was the only way von Falk could finance the next wave he envisioned, pharmaceuticals, and Futhark already had a foot in that door as a sideline to fabric.  The company’s road agents, on request from their clients, would also arrange shipment from the chemists’ guild in Ludwigshafen, accompanying fabric used for dressings.  Thus Futhark Medizinanbieter AG (Futhark Medicine Providers—FMP) was born early in 1887.  At the time of the sale and merger, the money required came from Istvan’s public offering of Futhark.

The world wars were kind to the company, and sons of the employees were end customers too.  FMP became expert at packaged, sterile dressing and getting it to where it needed to be, starting an express drayage company along the way.  Verband had been selling a non-opioid analgesic since its first days.  Von Falk, in command of the medicine line of FMP, had been travelling in the U.S before the “Great War”, with passage booked on the return, eastbound run of the R.M.S Titanic’s first sailings, when he heard the term “snake oil”.  He bought seventeen different varieties of this frontier patent medicine and analyzed it back at the company.  Oh, My!  There’s no way any of FMP’s products will ever, over my living body, be associated with snake oil or its meaning.  He got serious about trauma analgesics, and until the Allies punished any company profiting off of WWII, on the losing side of course, FMP had actually gotten a respected name among trauma personnel.  FMP received a less onerous treatment because, first it was a commercial venture that a couple of influential persons wanted their hands on, legally if all else failed.  Second, every shipment of their analgesic outside of Germany’s zone of conquest was accompanied by their own freight expediters and stevedores, sometimes as many as six on one shipment.  Those expediters and stevedores were all Jewish, originally real employees.  When they were all safe, the later batches required more finagling.