Kilmer House

One is a global health care company.  The other is the world’s most famous fictional detective, who has a very real museum dedicated to him at 221B Baker Street in London, his famous fictional residence.  So what does Sherlock Holmes have to do with the founding of Johnson & Johnson?  Well, Watson, if you haven’t already deduced the answer (one might even be tempted to say it’s elementary), read on to find out how they’re connected! Public domain illustration of Sherlock Holmes by Victorian illustrator Sidney Paget. Sherlock Holmes illustration courtesy of Wikimedia Commons at this link. B

As regular readers of Kilmer House know, Johnson & Johnson has been making sterile sutures since the late 1880s. Until Johnson & Johnson became a global decentralized company, our operations were largely based in New Brunswick, N.J., the city in which we were founded, and we sold our products throughout the world through sales agents as part of a thriving export business.  However, during the Nineteen Teens, the disruptions caused by World War I made it harder for some areas of the world to import our products and those of other manufacturers.  (That was one of the things that led Gene

A recent column commemorating Sir Joseph Lister’s April 5th birthday opened with this startling statement:  “Joseph Lister, who was born this week (April 5) in 1827, was an amazing physician but a poor salesman.”  [“Lister's Life Saving Discovery, by Bruce Kauffmann, Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, IA and the Appeal-Democrat in Marysville, CA]  It may have taken some time to inspire skeptical surgeons in the late 1800s, but Lister did inspire two people who were very good at spreading the word, and they took up the cause of making surgery sterile:  Robert Wood Johnson and Fred Kilmer. Robert Wood