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Johnson & Johnson trademarked a red cross design for its medicinal plasters in 1905, years before Congress protected the emblem for the American Red Cross, and later sued the Red Cross in federal court over it before the two settled. The company traces to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where Robert Wood Johnson heard Joseph Lister make the case for antiseptic surgery. In 1886 he and his brothers James and Edward opened in a former wallpaper factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with 14 employees, eight of them women, making sterile surgical dressings. Pharmacist Fred Kilmer, hired in 1889, built an autoclave-based steam sterilization process, and the company mailed 85,000 copies of an antiseptic wound care manual to doctors and pharmacists. Earl Dixon invented the Band-Aid in 1920 for his wife, and Robert Wood Johnson II wrote Our Credo in 1943, ranking stockholders last among the company’s responsibilities.

In 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules; CEO James E. Burke ordered a nationwide recall of 31 million bottles and relaunched the brand with tamper-evident seals. Later decades brought more than 40,000 lawsuits alleging its talc baby powder caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma, internal documents suggesting the company knew of possible asbestos contamination as early as 1971, and a 2018 St. Louis verdict of $4.7 billion for 22 women and their families. J&J moved the talc claims into a subsidiary, LTL Management, and put it into Chapter 11, a Texas two-step that federal courts dismissed as a bad faith filing. In 2023 it ended talc powder sales worldwide and spun off its consumer brands as Kenvue.

• Lawsuits revealed that J&J funded studies at Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania, run by dermatologist Albert Kligman, in which inmates were injected with asbestos to compare its skin effects with talc.
• The induction-sealed foil under modern medicine caps is a direct result of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings, which remain unsolved.
• J&J agreed to pay up to $5 billion in opioid settlements and paid $70 million in 2011 over bribery allegations in Greece, Poland, Romania and Iraq.
• Secondary patent filings on the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline held back generics in high-burden countries until a 2023 agreement.
• The slimmed-down company now focuses on medicines such as Darzalex and medtech, buying Shockwave Medical for $13.1 billion and Abiomed for $16.6 billion.