Cardinal Health
Healthcare company
Cardinal Health Technologies, LLC doing business as Cardinal Health, is an American multinational health care services company, and the 15th highest revenue generating company in the United States. Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, the company specializes in the distribution of pharmaceuticals and medical products, serving more than 100,000 locations. The company also manufactures medical and surgical product, including gloves, surgical apparel, and fluid management products. In addition, it operates one of the largest networks of radiopharmacies in the U.S. Cardinal Health provides medical products to over 75 percent of hospitals in the United States.
History
Founded in 1971 as Cardinal Foods by Robert D. Walter, the company was initially a food wholesaler. After acquiring the Bailey Drug Company in 1979, it began whole selling drugs. The company went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1983.
In 1988, Walter sold Cardinal Health's food operations to Roundy's. From 1991 to 1996, the company's sales grew from $1.2 billion to $8.9 billion. The company changed its name to Cardinal Health in 1994, and became the third-largest pharmaceutical wholesaler in the United States.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cardinal Health” as healthcare company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as healthcare company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q902397. VIAF identifies the subject as 152022291. The Library of Congress control number is no2011021893. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1979, 1983 and 1988.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Cardinal Health”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Cardinal Health primary sources, Cardinal Health archive and Cardinal research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Cardinal Health”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Cardinal Health” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.