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

the elaboration of chemical drugs cannot be improvised and has to
be subject to a general industrial flow chart.

In this model, the pharmaceutical industry does not exist, at least
understood as an easily identifiable sub-sector; the preparation of
drugs is carried out in factories in which, in addition, explosives,
dyestuffs, perfumes, photographic material are also elaborated. The
birth of German or Swiss pharmaceutical industries is chemical; only
those laboratories created as a result of the breakthrough with alka-
loids, the cases of Merk-Darmstad or Schering are two good examples,
originating in apothecaries, the rest proceeded from the evolution of
other less specialized fabrication centres (Agfa, Bayer, Hoescht, Ciba,
Geigy, Sandoz, etc.). The break through of new pharmaceutical forms
and the application of French machinery would come later, when
chemical infrastructure had already been consolidated, favouring the
development of the pharmaceutical speciality more linked to the great
chemical laboratory than to the professional collective of pharmacists.

The fundamental axis of the ‘traditional’ model is pharmacy, un-
derstood as a highly qualified profession but also as a scientific dis-
cipline on its own. This premise is extremely useful for understand-
ing the principal characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry in the
countries of southern Europe; its objective is medicine and this can
never be a sub-product attainable as a result of ordinary processes of
industrial chemistry. In these factories the drug is the protagonist and
its preparation is, generally, the only line of possible activity in this
type of laboratory.

For the large factories of German dyestuffs, medicines appear as
the result of general chemical planning or as another object in a di-
versified superstructure in need of an adequate covering, of pharma-
ceutical form, for its commercialisation. For the French industries the
covering is the final aim and the chemical substances are no more than
raw materials with which to elaborate the end product. While the med-
icine industry in Central European countries is essentially, pharmaceu-
tical chemical, that of the European Mediterranean countries tends to-
wards pharmaceutical specialities and while the former depends on
organic chemistry, the latter depends on pharmaceutical technology.

Laboratories of pharmaceutical specialities are born from the su-
per-production of the chemist’s shops at a time marked by the prescrip-

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