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Sterling Drug

American pharmaceutical company

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ7611398 ↗
Source-derived summary

Sterling Drug was an American based global pharmaceutical company. It was also known as Sterling Winthrop, Inc., after the merger with Winthrop-Stearns Inc. which itself resulted from the merger of Winthrop Chemical Company Inc. and Frederick Stearns & Company. It was formerly known as Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceuticals.

Primary product lines included diagnostic imaging agents, hormonal products, cardiovascular products, analgesics, antihistamines and muscle relaxants.

Chemical compounds produced by this company were often known by their manufacturing code which consisted of the abbreviation WIN (for Winthrop) followed by a number. For example, WIN 18,320 was nalidixic acid, the first quinolone antibiotic.

History

1910s

The Company was established in 1901 (then called Neuralgyline Co.) in Wheeling, West Virginia, by Albert H. Diebold and William E. Weiss, a pharmacist. At the end of World War I in 1918, Sterling purchased the US assets of a German company now known as Bayer AG for US$5.3 million.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sterling Drug” is american pharmaceutical company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sterling, Drug and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1901, 1918—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1901. For this dossier, Sterling, Drug and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american pharmaceutical company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7611398. VIAF identifies the subject as 151334758. The Library of Congress control number is n85134602. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901 and 1918.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. 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.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Sterling Drug”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Sterling Drug primary sources, Sterling Drug archive and Sterling research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Sterling Drug”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Sterling Drug” 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.