Hungarian pharmacist Gedeon Richter files an application to purchase a pharmacy in downtown Budapest. It is regarded as the birthplace of our company and that of the Hungarian pharmaceutical industry as a whole.
Gedeon Richter was born into a family of landowning grain merchants in the Hungarian village of Ecséd on 23 September 1872. Having lost his parents at an early age, Gedeon Richter was raised by his maternal grandparents. He received his pharmacist’s diploma in 1895, followed by a two-year obligatory training in the field. From 1897 he travelled extensively in Europe in order to acquire experience in pharmacy practices and pharmaceutical manufacturing. A believer in innovative therapies and the newly discovered organotherapy, he used his inheritance to buy the Sas Pharmacy (which is still owned by the company) at the end of 1901. He set up a biological preparative laboratory and a laboratory for conducting chemical experiments in the pharmacy’s basement, and he began to produce and sell restoratives and various organotherapeutic hormone preparations made from animal organs.
