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Eli Lilly and Company is a global pharmaceutical company and one of the world's largest corporations. Eli Lilly's global headquarters is located in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the United States. The company was founded in 1876 by a pharmaceutical chemist, Eli Lilly, after whom the company was ultimately named.
Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmacist who had served as a Union officer in the American Civil War, acquired a laboratory on Pearl Street in Indianapolis in 1876 and started Eli Lilly and Company. His innovative process of gelatin-coating pills helped establish the success of the company. When Eli Lilly died in 1898, his son Josiah K. Lilly Sr. took control of the company. Josiah inherited his father's civic mindedness and ordered the company to send much needed medicine to support recovery efforts following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Among the company's major pharmaceutical breakthroughs are cephalosporin, erythromycin, insulin, and, with Prozac (fluoxetine), the world's first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor for the treatment of clinical depression. Among other distinctions, Lilly is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of medications used in a broad range of psychiatric and mental health-related conditions, including clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, narcotic addiction, insomnia, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and others.
