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

an attempt to resolve old pharmaceutical problems and to adapt the
dispensary tactics to the new sciences of health. This modernisation
of the professional collective of pharmacy was made use of by the
drugs industry for its own development. In effect, both traditional
pharmaceutical preparations as well as the modern pharmaceutical
forms appearing in the last 30 years of the 19th century would be sub-
jected to a profound technological recycling in order to accelerate and
make the process of production profitable (2, 3).

In the following pages we will try to discern and typify most mod-
els of industrial development. We shall endeavour to define what the
characteristics are that, from a technical option, define both models.
The drugs industry presents some of its own characteristics that dif-
fer from the chemical industry, to which they tend to be united con-
ceptually. It is certain that both have in common —although more so
today— the use of processes of similar production, but they differ —
more so in the past— in the finality itself of the finished product. The
drug is not always of chemical origin and for this its industrialisation
process is not strictly comparable with that of the chemical industry
in general. The specificity of the pharmaceutical industry is closely
related to the final aspect with which the drug is presented, the phar-
maceutical dosage form (4).

The European chemical industry has been the object of a great
number of studies, some of which have centred on strictly technolog-
ical aspects or of industrial projection (5, 6), others have attacked the
problem from an economic or political viewpoint (7, 8), although oth-
ers have compared the models of industrialisation followed by differ-
ent European countries (9, 10). Our work attempts to deal with the
peculiar characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry, whose origin
resides in the existence of a professional group dedicated, previous to
the appearance of manufacturing processes, to the artisan elaboration
of medicines. The models of compliance of these professionals, to new
industrial techniques, is the object of this paper.

2. THE INNOVATION: THE CENTRAL-EUROPEAN MODEL

From the last quarter of the 19th century, chemical industries be-
gan to take on an importance in the consolidation of the European

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