Drugs

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

a general term covering all materials whatever entering into medicines. The history of the drug trade is really the history of medicine. For long centuries a struggle was carried on between the advocates of vegetable remedies and the advocates of minerals-between simples, as balsams, gums, resins, roots, and leaves, on the one hand, and chemicals, as mercury, borax, salt, sulphur, lead, soda, and lime, on the other. See article on CHEMISTRY. At one time the pharmacist or druggist was chiefly a gatherer and curer of such plants as dandelion, boneset, sassafras, ginseng, snakeroot, and the like. The early American druggist carried and dealt in many articles now considered a part of the hardware trade, as nails, glass, putty, paint, and oils. The list of drugs now recognized by the medical trade, the materia medica of the pharmacist, includes over a thousand titles. It is safe to say that the druggist deals in a greater number of articles, representing more localities and more remote parts of the earth, than any other business man of his acquaintance. The discovery of America added a surprisingly large number of drugs to the market. The old chroniclers make much of the wonderful herbs and barks of America, such as tobacco, quinine, sassafras, sarsaparilla, jalap, ipecac, etc. Stone oil, or petroleum, at first so rare as to be used only in medicines and as a liniment, was found first in Virginia and was introduced to the world as an American remedy. Vaseline and a large number of petroleum products owe their use to American ingenuity and enterprise. Fifty years ago the druggist compounded most of his medicines at great expense of time and labor. Today about 8,000 patent medicines and remedies, prepared in manufactories, are listed in the wholesale druggist's catalog. So far as compounding goes, the retail druggist now confines his efforts to filling prescriptions. One of the modern devices appreciated by those so unfortunate as to need medicines is the administering of nauseous and bitter drugs in sugar-coated pills, gelatine capsules, and tablets. Over five hundred varieties of the latter are on the American market. Candy is the direct outgrowth of sugar-coating pills. The druggist used sweets to make his medicine agreeable and found in time that the sweets gave quite as much satisfaction without medicine. From the latest statistics, it appears that 276 manufacturing pharmacists, in the United States alone, employ 6,000 people and turn out about $30,000,000 worth of preparations a year. In 1906 the American jobbers imported drugs to the amount of $16,414,868.37. See Disease ; Medicine ; Disinfectant ; Opium ; Camphor ; Sarsaparilla ; Ginseng ; Tolu ; Gum ; Candy ; Detroit ; Lowell , etc.