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ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ BUENO Y RAÚL RODRÍGUEZ NOZAL AN. R. ACAD. NAC. FARM.

tion of specific generalised remedies for pathologically homogeneous
populations. This would explain the movement of the Mediterranean
pharmaceutical industry towards exclusively inter-professional capital-
isations. The structures of their laboratories do not derive from Lim-
ited Companies, but family enterprises with pharmaceutical capital or
arising from chemist‘s shops and directed commercially and technical-
ly by professionals of the drug business.

The decisive implication of the chemist in the Mediterranean area
in the construction of the pharmaceutical industrial framework was
key to the conformation of a model with its own identity, strongly par-
ticipated by professional corporations and with the industrial solu-
tions or recipes, exportable to modest pharmaceutical laboratories as
well as proceeding from these, a mechanism of reciprocity which re-
minds us how originally the laboratory of pharmaceutical specialities
was no more than a prolongation of the dispensary.

The industrialisation of medicines has been effected by two differ-
ent models. Central European countries, involved themselves in the
manufacture of large-scale pharmaceutical specialities taking advan-
tage of the important advances in Chemistry and Technology. On the
other hand, the Europe nations around the Mediterranean area, tried
to accelerate and benefit from their traditional procedures of manu-
al elaboration, using apparatus and machinery that, in general, only
permitted the mechanisation of some of the productive stages.

The triumphant model was that of the Central European countries,
essentially for its capacity to respond to the principal industrialisa-
tion criteria: mechanisation, re-productivity, profitability, wholesale
elaboration, tendency to the implantation of a single productive
process and the use of machinery of continuous function. Their most
important innovations, tablets and hard gelatine capsules are today,
two of the predominant pharmaceutical forms.

The model of the European-Mediterranean countries, although, on
occasion, complying with some of the necessary conditions for large-
scale fabrication, was never able to compete with the powerful Eng-
lish or German manufacturers. The idiosyncrasy itself of the French,
Spanish or Italian pharmaceutical collective, more prone to individu-
alised elaboration, would gag, limit and even cause the failure of its
own industrialisation prospects. Its two main contributions, the soft

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