Abbott

Wallace Abbott started a pharmaceutical business in Chicago in 1888, selling dosed drugs rather than powders a pharmacist measured by hand. Over the next century Abbott became a broad medical company: nutrition, diagnostics, branded drugs, and devices.

In 2013 it spun the research-drug business into AbbVie and kept the rest. The Abbott that remains makes glucose monitors, diagnostics, infant formula, and cardiovascular devices. It is old enough that its history includes drugstore products, and large enough that a hospital stocks it without thinking of it as a technology company.

The hospital's supplier

Abbott employs scientists, line workers, and a sales force that calls on hospitals. A continuous glucose monitor, a recent growth product, also created a quieter job outside the company: the clinician and the patient who spend the week looking at a stream of numbers. The firm sells the sensor. The work of responding to it happens in clinics and kitchens. That split is the pattern the later neural chapter worries about, already visible in a product Abbott ships today.

Continuous, under one name

Abbott is still independent. The 1888 firm and the 2013 spinoff are easy to confuse, which is why this page stays with the company that kept the name. Where the 2040 chapter pairs it with Medtronic, the point is incumbency. These are the firms that already know how to manufacture, insure, and service an object that enters a body.

The hospital's supplier

Continuous, under one name

The work it organized

On the timeline

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