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VOL. 76 (4), 459-478, 2010 INNOVATION VS. TRADITION: THE ELECTION…

cal specialities prepared from German associates, on French territo-
ry, thanks to the existence of these figureheads. These would then be
sold in France and Germany as if they had been French prepared, in
accordance with the Convention of Bern. The results were much more
beneficial for the German industrialists, as they managed to export
their merchandise and avoid their own pharmaceutical legislation
which prevented them from selling drugs ready for consumption at
another price other than the official tariff. Despite a notable expan-
sion, in the form of chemical subsiduaries established in French soil
and through prête-noms pharmaceuticals, France continued to carry
an important weight in the drugs industry.

Contrary to what had happened with the German chemical drug
industry, the French laboratories were, for the greater part, specifical-
ly pharmaceutical either in specialities or in chemical products and
their qualified personnel included many medicals, biologists and phar-
macists as well as the chemists and chemical engineers, also present
in German industry.

As an answer to the triumphant apparition of tablets in the drug in-
dustry, French pharmacy was to concentrate its interest on another two
new pharmaceutical forms: the soft gelatine capsules and the cachets.
While the former responded to a pure industrialised model, which in
the end would not last due to be unstoppable rise in hard gelatine cap-
sules, the cachets arise as the most modern banner of the traditional
pharmacy (26). With the advance of technology and the establishment
of procedures of large scale drug manufacture in full swing, this phar-
maceutical form, clearly homemade, and poorly adapted to wholesale
production, appears.

Gelatine capsules were invented by the French pharmacist Fran-
çois Achille Barnabe Mothes in 1883, with the aim of disguising the
medicinal substances of disagreeable organoleptic propieties. The
method invented by Mothes, was based on the immersion of ovoid
metallic moulds in baths of liquid gelatine, a troublesome process,
which required great manual skill and was not very productive. These
limitations facilitated the development of new systems of encapsula-
tion, more in accordance with industrial imperatives that began to be
in vogue in most developed countries. The proposal of the French
pharmacist Viel (1844) was in this context and constituted the first

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