This blog highlights New Jersey medical history objects from  Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences.

Click the View Collection tab above or the icon below for a list of all objects in this digital collection.

Latest Post: Valium

Valium Professional Supply Pack. Click on image to view in 3D

(Special Collections, George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences)

For decades, Nutley, NJ received tax revenue generated from a soothing source: Valium.

In 1929, pharmaceutical company Hoffman-LaRoche (now just Roche) built a large research and manufacturing facility straddling Nutley and Clifton.

In 1941, with his Swiss employer Hoffman-LaRoche’s help, chemist Leo Sternbach fled Nazi persecution and resettled in the United States, working in Nutley.

In the late 1950s, Sternbach and his colleagues discovered a new class of anti-anxiety drugs, the benzodiazapenes, which culminated in the 1963 invention of diazepam, marketed as Valium – the world’s first blockbuster drug.

Valium calms nerves, but can be habit-forming.

In 1978, at its peak, Roche produced about 2.3 billion Valium (Valiums? Valia?). Cultural references to Valium are found in the Rolling Stones’ Mother’s Little Helper (1966), Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), and even Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987).

Valium’s patent expired in 1985, and Roche closed its Nutley facility in 2014.

Anxious Nutley administrators were somewhat calmed by financial aid from both Roche and the State of New Jersey to ease the town’s dependence on Roche tax revenues.

And now the Nutley site is poised to continue to play a role in New Jersey medical history as the future home of a new Seton Hall University – Hackensack University Health Network medical school.

Resources:

Profile of Leo Sternbach from the Newsletter of the Medical History Society of New Jersey (see page 4)

The New Yorker on Leo Sternbach’s 95th

New Medical School for the Roche Facility in Nutley

One of many obituaries of Leo Sternbach