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

sules of hard gelatine were specially indicated as a support of solid
medicines, which were less used at this time than the liquid forms
and, therefore, only needed moderately high productions in order to
profit from the construction of capsular moulds.

The amylaceous capsules made their appearance in France in the
middle of the 19th century as a pharma-technical answer to certain
problems of solubility that some covered pills represented. In 1853,
the French man André Alexandre Guilliermond proposed a new phar-
maceutical form which he called enazyme, as a result of closing a pre-
viously flattened pill, between two discs of unleavened bread approx-
imately two centimetres in diameter and hollowed in the centre, which
were then soldered by pressure after moistening the discoidal edges.
The enazyme of Guilliermond did not have much repercussion in the
pharmaceutical world until 20 years later. In 1873, Stanislas Limou-
sin, also French, presented, first to the Societe de Pharmacie de Paris
and later to the Académie Nationale de Médecine, a new pharmaceuti-
cal form, basically very similar to that proposed in 1853 by Guillier-
mond, which he named cachets médicamenteux (28). The Limousin’s
cachets were capable of hiding the disagreeable odours and tastes of
some drugs, by avoiding the interactions of drug and excipient due to
the absence of the latter. They could be used in a great number of
drugs, due to the possibilities offered by the technical proposals for
filling, closing and sealing that he had elaborated. The success of Lim-
ousin lay in generalising the elaboration of amylaceous capsules by
the previous establishment of technological keys that would propiti-
ate their existence, that is, while the enazyme of Guilliermond is only
the final result of our specific pharmaceutical operation, the essential
in the Limousin’s idea is the pharmaceutical form, the cachet, usable,
generally speaking, for any drug. The evolution of traditional pharma-
cy towards the drug industry had already begun.

Injectable vials was a particular and integrated pharmaceutical
dosage form; the inyectable were invented in 1886, by the French
chemist Stanislas Limousin (29). Their magnificent reception among
european pharmacists of the Mediterranean area was due to the hand-
made character of this pharmaceutical form and the artisan manner
of carrying out this type of preparation. Perhaps for this, the name
that has lasted has been that of the Latin root Ampullae and not that
of Amphiolen or Einschmelzgláser, proposed by the German Pharma-

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