Albert Heinrich Riise

[1][2] Equipped with a large stock of all kinds of goods, especially pharmaceutical products, St. Thomas Pharmacy became known throughout the surrounding Caribbean islands as the place where anything one might need for any household was to be obtained.

Riise had a lively interest in botany and with utilized Caribbean exotic plants and animal life for the preparation of pharmaceutical, cosmetic and alcoholic products.

Unfortunately for them, however, the young American Edward Drinker Cope found a number of Riise's (he thought the man was called Rüse) specimens from the Danish West Indies of the species that they were in the process of describing which had been sent to America.

He rushed to describe them for posterity himself, publishing his work in 1862 a week or two earlier than them, which necessitated a rash of last-minute changes to their manuscript before it could be brought to the printers.

Riise was also successful in the distillation and sale of bitters from the West Indies, which at the time were used as a medicine for stomach ills and other hardships.

A company exploiting one of these trademarks was awarded a medal at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, after his death.

[6] When there were epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox in 1868, the family decided to travel to Denmark for a year.