Pharmacist Ambrose Hunsberger, in his sweeping introduction covering pharmacy's development in the United States prior to the events discussed in his 1923 article on Prohibition's impact, "The Practice of Pharmacy Under the Volstead Act," described pharmacy before its organization (which he places around 1821) in terms that evoke the snake oil salesmen and medicine shows that hit every town, hamlet and village in the country: "...the disorganized system of hawking medicinal remedies which prevailed throughout our thinly populated country. There was no method of protecting the public from fraud through control or regulation of the sale of adulterated and harmful medicinal products, and the credulous citizenry of the young nation was beguiled by every description of fakir and charlatan into buying their fantastic panaceas." Hunsberger puts the practice of "more or less methodical" pharmacy in Europe "two or three centuries" back, as early as the 16th or 17th century, whereas he places the start of organized pharmacy in the United States with the founding of America's first formal college of pharmacy, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (PCP), in 1821.
