The retail drug trade of the present day has become almost altogether a mere distribution of the products of the great pharmaceutical and biological laboratories which are continu ally adding new remedies to their already exten sive lists. The business of the largest manu facturing houses has become sixfold: the gathering of the crude drugs; the extraction of their active principles; the manufacture of synthetic drug preparations; the testing out for standardization; the commercial dispensing of their products; and the discovering of new drugs by specially commissioned explorers in the most remote regions of the earth.
Still another important factor in the growth and development of the drug trade is the Amer ican pharmaceutical press. Among the most prominent periodicals are such weekly papers as the Pharmaceutical Era, the Shipping and Com mercial List, and the Oil, Paint axd Drug Re porter, all of New York; semi-monthlies like the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, of New York, and such monthly jour nals as the American Journal of Pharmacy, of Philadelphia; the Druggists' Circular and Chemical Gazette, of New York; Pharmaceut ische Rundschau, of New York: the Western Druggist, of Chicago the National Druggist, of Saint Louis, and the New England Druggist, of Boston. Besides these there are some smaller periodicals of local influence, as well as a con siderable number of publications issued by various colleges and societies, and by prominent drug firms and manufacturing houses.
There is, perhaps, no particular in which the development of the drug trade is indicated more clearly than in the improvements in its methods. Less than a century ago the apothecary was obliged to cut and roll his pills by hand, and to make his plasters with a °spreading iron.° He powdered his drugs in a stone or iron mor tar, and made his tinctures in a wide-mouthed jar with the aid of a stirring stick. To-day such operations are performed by machinery, a process which has so simplified the work that the manufacturing pharmacist is now able, by the use of his power-machine, to turn out more than 100,000 pills a day, and plasters almost ad libitum. The power-machines which are used in the making of compressed tablets now made more than 500 tablets a minute.
The making of fluid extracts as a class of pharmaceutical preparations is essentially an American invention. They are made by perco
lation, or displacement, a process by which the powdered drug, placed in a suitable vessel, is deprived of its soluble constituents, by the descent of a solvent through it, an invention the importance of which cannot be overesti mated, as much of the progress in American pharmacy during the last half of the 19th cen tury was largely due to the study and develop ment of the process of percolation, and the in troduction of preparations which owed their existence directly to this invention. Percola tion received the stamp of official recognition in the °Pharmacopoeia° of 1840, and has occupied a place in all subsequent editions of that work. None of the editions of the °Pharmacopreia,° prior to that of 1850, gave any formulas for the preparation of fluid extracts. In 1850, seven of these formulas were given and by 1890 the number had been increased to 88, although this number does not begin to represent the total manufacture of fluid extracts, which have now become almost as numerous and as popular as the vegetable drugs. Associated with the earliest manufacture of these extracts are the names of Henry Thayer of Boston, and Tilden & Co. of New Lebanon, N. Y.
Another innovation is the so-called which were originated some time in the later thirties. For a time this term was used almost exclusively by manufacturers to designate their aromatic, sweetened, spirituous preparations which contained comparatively small quantities of active medicinal substances, but no formula under that name was published for the use of druggists until 1859.
The first sugar-coated pills made in this country were manufactured by Bullock & Cren shaw of Philadelphia, and the Tilden Company, of New Lebanon, N. Y. The use of gelatine capsules as a means of administering nauseous remedies in a readily assimilable condition was also the direct result of American enterprise. This process was originally outlined by Mothes, of Paris, but the success in popularizing it was due to the efforts of H. Planten Sr Son, the firm which first made them in the United States. A firm which became very prominent in the earliest manufacture of gelatine coated pills was McKesson & Robbins.