On June 10, 1946, Benadryl — diphenhydramine — received FDA approval and went on sale in the United States as the first antihistamine available to the general public.

The synthesis had been developed by George Rieveschl, a chemist at the University of Cincinnati. That is what the historical record says.

What it does not say is that Rieveschl's graduate student, Loraine Gelling, contributed substantially to the laboratory work that led to the synthesis. Her name appears in the research notes. It does not appear on the patent, filed in 1943, or on the formal publications.

This pattern — graduate students, frequently women, doing the laboratory synthesis work while male supervisors claim invention credit — runs throughout 20th-century pharmaceutical history. The structure of academic and corporate research in that era systematically converted women's labor into men's discoveries.

Diphenhydramine is now on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. It is taken by hundreds of millions of people each year for allergies, insomnia, and motion sickness.

Rieveschl received royalties that made him wealthy. Gelling's contribution was not recovered until historians began examining lab notebooks decades later.