Macomb G. Foster

A leader in applying modern science to the making of drugs, Macomb G. Foster was for fifty-seven years engaged in their manufacture in this city. For forty-nine years he was a trustee of Knickerbocker Hospital and for fifteen years its president. Physicians recognized the exactitude of his firm’s chemistry and the complete honesty of its products. That was one side of his long, active, and useful career. The other, recalled by a fellow Centurion and old friend and neighbor on Long Island, describes him as a navigator of rare skill and the best of companions on a cruise. To his sailing Foster gave the same thoroughness and scientific care that he gave to his business. Whether drugs really improve the lives of anyone, it is for the medical members to say. Nothing, however, it is submitted, could better establish Foster and his friend as true Centurions than the record of their landfall and refreshment. The boat was named the Lotowana. Writes the shipmate: “At nightfall, at anchor, what was then the well known Lotowana cocktail would appear. It was the best drink for sailors that anybody ever concocted since the days of our ancestor, Noah, earliest of sailors and inventor of wine; a drink that taught us to remember, together, the names of chemists and benefactors, Priestley, Pasteur, and Foster.” Since it was the discoveries of Pasteur that saved French wine from destruction, it must surely have been a Bordeaux or a Burgundy that sent the crew of the Lotowana to bed drugless but happy. “I have seldom been so content as when I was sailing with Foster,” concludes the neighbor. The words seem the fitting epitaph, calling for no enlargement or explanation. Let it only be added that Foster reached the ample age of seventy-eight. His friend, who writes in praise and lament of him[,] is today eighty-four.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials