From the downtown Los Angeles homeopathic pharmacy started by eight physicians in 1903, to the shelves of nearly every pharmacy and grocery store in North America today, the people of Hyland’s and its parent company, Standard Homeopathic Company, have worked to make safe and natural medicines accessible to everyone.

In 1900 homeopathy was a standard medical practice in the United States and a household name. Since shipping medicines from one region to another could take weeks, or even months, homeopathic pharmacies were a fixture in most large cities. These pharmacies, which included Borneman in Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel and Luyties in St. Louis, Kiehl’s in New York and Ehrhard & Karl in Chicago, stocked the medicines and often formulated them in on-site labs.

The Los Angeles doctors founded Standard Homeopathic Pharmacy because they were frustrated waiting for medicines to arrive from the East. They hired George Hyland as their first pharmacist at that downtown Los Angeles location, on 7th Street between Broadway and Spring Street, and in 1910 he bought the business and initiated a tradition of pharmacists as owners and/or top managers of the company. That tradition continues today.

A Family in Business

Also in 1910, a report backed by the American Medical Association helped create a change in the way doctors are trained that would prove to be a challenge for proponents of complementary medicine for nearly a century. The so-called Flexner report established requirements for medical colleges including more facilities and more extensive curricula, pushing nearly half of all medical schools out of business. Since many of the homeopathic physicians were trained at the smaller, less well-funded schools, Flexner led to a huge reduction in their numbers.

It took time for the strain to reach the big-city homeopathic pharmacies and in 1928, with his business growing, George Hyland hired University of Southern California (USC) School of Pharmacy graduate Cecil Craig and put him in charge of his manufacturing lab. “Mr. Craig,” as he was later known, became the company patriarch and helped develop many of the medicines that are among the 3,500 products the company sells today.

As prescription medicine began to dominate the field in the middle of the 20th century and marketing natural medicines became more challenging, homeopathic pharmacies across the country turned to other products. Under Cecil Craig, Standard had great success developing the first aspirin for children. Craig’s eldest daughter, Marion, had trouble swallowing pills and perhaps to satisfy her, he formulated pink aspirin tablets that dissolved almost instantly in the mouth. It was a compelling feature that helped make the aspirin extremely popular and become the precursor for Hyland’s Teething Tablets, the company’s current bestseller.

Though they did not all have lifelong careers with Standard Homeopathic, Mr. Craig’s three sons and two daughters each worked in the business and came away with an appreciation for their father’s dedication to homeopathy. His younger daughter, Patricia (Pat) Craig Phillips, a registered nurse who ran the dilution laboratory in the 1980’s and 90’s, remembers her father ultimately discontinuing the popular children’s aspirin partly because it was not homeopathic. “He was really committed to homeopathy at a time when it was not so easy to promote,” Pat Phillips says. “We owe him a debt of gratitude for keeping it going.”

In 1955 Cecil’s son, Jack Craig, joined Standard as a salesman. He grew into operations positions and took over the business following the death of his father in 1980. Hard working, informal in dress and manner, and well liked by his employees. “He was always ‘Jack,’ never ‘Mr. Craig,’” Pat Phillips says. “Jack set the company on a course for growth.”

“Jack had high goals,” says his brother, Dick Craig, a second generation USC School of Pharmacy graduate. Dick Craig had a successful career as the owner of a Los Angeles retail pharmacy before becoming a homeopathic drug information pharmacist at Standard in the 1990’s. “Jack did an incredible job and exceeded our father’s expectations,” he says.

“Who We Are” Groups

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the John A. Borneman family followed a parallel track through the 20th century. Dr. Borneman, a teacher at the Hahnemann College of Homeopathy, started his pharmacy in Philadelphia shortly after Standard opened in Los Angeles. His grandson, John A. (Jack) Borneman III, responded to the mid-century challenges to homeopathy by writing, with the help of others in the business, the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia. This detailed presentation of thousands of natural medicines was a key in updating federal regulations and creating more favorable market conditions for homeopathic medicines.

“We organized people from the industry and we went to Washington to explain our medicines and our business,” to officials at regulatory bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission, Jack Borneman says. “We called ourselves the ‘Who We Are’ group, because in the 1950’s and after, most people couldn’t say the word, homeopathy, let alone understand it.”

The 1970’s were a time of collegiality among American homeopathic companies as much larger European companies, flush with success and takeover ambitions, began looking to buy U.S. firms. Jack Borneman, Jack Craig and Glen Hill, a top executive with Luyties, a St. Louis-based homeopathic company, together with their wives, developed personal friendships they enjoyed at trade shows and meetings at widespread locales. The children of the owners of these companies grew up in the business and with an awareness of each other as, “professional cousins.”

John P. (Jay) Borneman IV, Jack Borneman’s son, who would prove gifted at marketing homeopathic products to consumers, became a chemist and went to work for Borneman & Sons. In 1985, Mark Phillips, Pat Phillips’s son and Jack Craig’s nephew, became the third Craig family generation to graduate from the USC pharmacy school and went on to become an executive at Standard Homeopathic. He already had years of “from the bottom up” experience working for the company, having begun in the production department cleaning glassware.

Key Innovations

Countless conventional prescription medicines were developed by others during the 20th century and many became commercially viable though they produced negligible benefits or sometimes harmful results. But beginning in the 1970’s with the gradual spread of the idea of personal responsibility for one’s health, natural medicines began to grow in favor. Standard’s pharmacists continued to develop “combination” medicines they formulated by combining several single remedies known to be effective for a particular ailment into one tablet. Examples include Calms Forte’™ sleep aid; Sniffles ‘n Sneezes 4 Kids, cold medicine; and several arnica-based pain relief products.

Jack Craig took advantage of the trend toward natural medicines by successfully marketing Hyland’s products, including the combination medicines, in health food stores. In 1987 he brought Jay Borneman to Standard as marketing director and together they used Hyland’s Teething Tablets to break into the chain drugstore market.

In 1995, Standard acquired Luyties Pharmacal Co., a St. Louis homeopathic firm tracing its lineage to 1853 when its medicines were popular on wagon trains. The purchase made Standard the only remaining American-owned homeopathic company in the United States.

The sale also brought Margot Murphy Moore to the company. Like Mark Phillips and Jay Borneman, Moore is a multi-generation progeny of the Murphy family-owned Luyties Pharmacal. In 1998 she started 1-800-Homeopathy, a catalog and Internet purveyor of homeopathic medicines within the Standard/Hyland’s portfolio.
Following Jack Craig’s untimely death in 1999, Jay Borneman as CEO and Mark Phillips as COO, executed a succession strategy that put the Hyland’s name and its line of popularly branded medicines at the company’s forefront.

As it has been since its inception, the company’s hallmark continues to be making safe and natural medicines accessible to all. Through its Tx Options division, headed by Jack Borneman III, the company provides single remedies to physicians and private consumers with a deeper interest in homeopathy.

Since 2000, the company has annually enjoyed double-digit growth, introduced many successful new products, put its medicines on the shelves of every major drug retailer, as well as Wal-Mart, and is poised to take advantage of the increasing demand for medicines that are effective without carrying negative side effects.

Without a doubt, Hyland’s today looks forward to a brighter, more exciting future than at any point during its 104-year history.

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