More Than You Really Need to Know About: Wilbur Scoville PhG ’1889, PhM, PhmD ’27

The “More Than You Really Need to Know” series features deep dives into the kind of arcane knowledge you can only discover deep in the archives of MCPHS University. As such, they are good for one thing, and one thing only: helping you win at pub trivia. 

Among foodies, the name Wilbur Scoville elicits a kind of shivery thrill. Often, a recital follows. “I’ve only had the Ghost once, in a chili, but I was hurting for three days afterwards!”

“I tried a Naga Viper. I just barely touched it to the tip of my tongue. It was like getting punched in the face.” 

“Know anyone who can get their hands on a Carolina Reaper?”

Anyone who has spent an afternoon watching the Food Network can attest, these terms—Ghost, Naga Viper, Carolina Reaper—refer not to strange and exotic hallucinogens, but to the hottest peppers on the planet, some so blistering that they are barely ingestible. The scale that Wilbur Scoville created gives gourmands and grocery stores alike a way to chart the relative spiciness of peppers, from the tame bell pepper (0 Scoville units) to the bold jalapeno (5,000 Scoville units), hot habanero (150,000 Scoville units) and beyond. Additionally, the Scoville scale provides chemists and scientists with an unprecedented way to quantify the subjective sensory experience of heat… other than crying, waving hands, and making frantic gestures for milk. 

A sampling of peppers and pepper products, ranked on the Scoville scale from least heat
(bell pepper; bottom) to most heat (pure capsaicin; top).

The Scoville scale is how Wilbur Scoville is best remembered, and so influential that it inspired its own Google Doodle, in honor of what would have been Wilbur Scoville’s 151st birthday. However, a recent discovery of his staff file at MCPHS University offers a glimpse into a world just beginning to grasp the profound pharmacological significance of food.

Scoville was a Massachusetts College of Pharmacy faculty member for 15 years. He contributed heavily to the pharmacy profession, notably through his most renowned work The Art of Compounding, a reference volume so ubiquitous that it was reprinted eight times and used as a textbook into the 1960s. Scoville also authored the extravagantly titled Extracts and Perfumes: a treatise on the most practical methods for the manufacture by the retail or wholesale pharmacists of flavoring extracts, colognes, toilet waters, perfumes, sachets, fumigating pastilles, etc. The volume offers a fascinating glimpse into the broad variety of purely cosmetic and commercial items which contemporary pharmacists were expected to compound. (For those wondering, a fumigating pastille was a solid perfume much like incense, packed and sold in small, flammable cones.) For these works, and for his sustained academic contributions, Scoville won the Ebert Prize and Remington Honor Medals from the American Pharmaceutical Association, and received honorary degrees from not only Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, but also Columbia University, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and the University of Michigan. 

Scoville’s early staff files foreshadow the interests that would later solidify into his most influential works. At different points during his career at MCP, he published papers on “Fluid extracts,” “Solutions,”and “Emulsions”; gave a lecture entitled “Modern developments in perfumistry”; and was an extraordinarily active member of multiple pharmaceutical societies. Charmingly, his file also reflects an eternal constant in academia: attempted professor poaching. In a fluid cursive hand, an unknown secretary at the college noted in May 1893: “The chair of Pharmacy at the Brooklyn [College of Pharmacy] was recently offered to Prof. Scoville. We are glad to say that our well esteemed professor did not find it possible to accept what appears to have been a very flattering offer & an equally substantial honor.” The offer appears to have been made during an active period in Scoville’s career, the same year he published three papers and led students on two field trips. (Oh, and Brooklyn College of Pharmacy? Not cool.)

Perhaps the most telling notes in Scoville’s file are records of his speech, fragments of thought that paint a picture of an imaginative mind both curious and optimistic about the possibilities lurking in the unknown. In remarks made to the American Pharmaceutical Association, Scoville observed, “There are as yet many unknown or not well understood factors in life processes, and these now unknown factors may be most important in determining the values of drugs. The discovery of vitamins and of the health influence of foods as compared to their nutritive value, suggests similar conditions in drugs and opens a new field for research […] Recent studies on enzymes, vitamins and endocrine glands have shown that while the chemical composition of vegetable or animal substances may be obscure and their mode of action not clear, yet their influence may be of great importance.” Long before nutritional labels, even before the molecular level composition of many foods was understood, Scoville sensed the potential for food to be used as a meaningful component of medicine. 

Of course, Scoville’s open-minded approach to medicine occasionally led down less fruitful pathways. He speculated that “the new Materia Medica includes not only [vegetable drugs], but all foods, light, heat, and even wind. The function of the last has not yet been made plain, but it will be an interesting study. The force which freckles the boy, tans the sailor, and puts vigor into the desk man has a real influence upon health.” (Not every idea was a pearl.) But Scoville’s attention to food’s potential was prescient. Even today, in a world that he would hardly recognize, we can find the traces of his science whenever we Google how to manage a chronic condition through diet, check an ingredient list for vitamin content, or cue up YouTube to watch one more video of a hapless foodie biting into a ridiculously hot pepper.

Thank you, Wilbur Scoville.