[Empirical studies on some drugs for patent lawsuits in the age of manufacturing patents]

Empirical studies on patent lawsuits for some drugs by author (K.Y.) from 1953-1998, are described. Case 1: One of the authors (K.Y.) clarified that silylmethylation of a penicillin derivative gave either N, O-disilylmethylated product or O-monosilylmethylated product. However, only O-silylmethylated product was obtained after the usual work-up (Fig. 1). Case 2: A point under discussion of the trial is whether the reported manufacturing process of "metoclopramide" is possible or not. One of the authors (K. Y.) clarified the possibility by means of a careful synthetic experiment (Fig. 2). Case 3: The essential effective structure of herbicides, Roundup (Monsanto Co.) and Sulfosate (Stoph Co.), was the same in highly diluted solution (Fig. 3). Case 4: Cimetidine has been prepared by the Oxy procedure (SKB Co.), but another cimetidine (Fujimoto Co.) was prepared by the Lek procedure. Is it true? Experimental preparations of both cimetidines by the respective Oxy and Lek processes, were achieved by the authors. The cimetidine in the tablet named "Cylock" by Fujimoto Pharm. Co., Ltd. should be manufactured by the Oxy process on the basis of the by-products analysis (Fig. 4). Finally, a short history of patents in Japan from 1899-1975 is described.

"The physician's hand": trends in the evolution of the apothecary and his art across Europe (1500-1700)

This article surveys the place of the apothecary in the Italian and wider European social and professional context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast to localized studies, a comparison across Europe can serve to measure the general pace and lines of development. The type of goods the apothecary sold will be analyzed, as well as the professional evolution of the apothecary and the competition offered by rival groups. Here, the apothecary shall be placed somewhere between merchants and medics, but his relationship with the civic authorities and the traditional guild structure shall also be elucidated. We shall see how changing circumstances, economic shifts and new therapeutic technologies affected the apothecary and his place in the world. For the Italian apothecary, trends only pointed to his eclipse, as northern European pharmaceutical texts, manufacture of medicinal goods and precepts of "the new science" came to the fore.

[Drugs and pharmaceutical episodes in "Sazae-San": Japanese comic strips in 1940s-1970s]

This is a report on episodes with references to drugs and pharmaceuticals in one of the most famous Japanese comic strips, "Sazae-san", in the period from 1945 to 1974. There were 111 episodes of "Sazae-san" including references to drugs and pharmaceuticals in this period. In the period from 1945 to 1954, there were some references to pharmacists and pharmacies but only a small number of references in the period from 1965 to 1974. In the period from 1945 to 1954, there were references to disinfectants and insecticides in the hygienic chemistry field. However, in the period from 1965 to 1974, there were references to environmental problems, food additives and agricultural chemicals. As drug development has progressed, the number of references to practical drugs in "Sazae-san" has decreased over the period from 1945-1974.

[Oral and formulated pharmaceutical preparations before the invention of tablets]

Author gave an overview of the main types of the fed and formated medicines used in times before invention of lozenges. Six main types of these pharmaceutical products are to be defined here: 1. conserva 2. electuaria or confectiones 3. morsuli 4. rotulae or tabulae made with sugar 5. trochsci or pastillae and 6. terrae sigillatae. Author defines the single forms, tells their short history and also presents the ways they were produced and the tools and machines needed for their fabrication.

[Early achievements of the Danish pharmaceutical industry--2. The minor and almost forgotten pharmaceutical companies]

The article series provides an account in words and pictures of the Danish pharmaceutical industry's products from the earliest times until about 1950. Part 2 deals with products from 16 minor pharmaceutical companies, founded in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Mentioned in chronological order, according to year of foundation, the companies are: C.R. Evers & Co., Jensen & Langebek-Petersens chemisk-techniske Fabrik, Leerbeck & Holms kemiske Fabriker, A/S Skelskør Frugtplantage, Fabriken Ferrin, Chr. F. Petri, Erslevs kemiske Laboratorium, A/S Edward Jacobsen, Th. Fallesen-Schmidt, Fabriken Ferraton, Chemia, Fabriken Kemisan, Central-Laboratoriet, F.F. Gonget & Co., A/S Ejco, and M. Schultz chemiske Fabrik. None of these minor pharmaceutical companies exist today as independent firms. All of them are either closed down or merged into other firms after a number of years. The bigger pharmaceutical companies ensured their continued existence by research and development of new products. The minor companies were not innovative to the same extent, but they played a role at an early stage in the production of Danish copy medicine and in that way a role in the establishment of a Danish generic pharmaceutical industry. The earliest products included dietetic preparations as malt products and albumin maltose products, and iron preparations, often with an admixture of medicine substances. Real medicines such as sleeping, analgesic and antipyretic medicines as well as anesthetics followed later.

[The role plaid by the port of Rouen in the trade of drugs and medicines with America]

Henry the second, king of France, limited the entrance of drugs coming by sea to two French ports, Rouen and Marseilles. Apothecaries of Rouen were in charge of sifting these drugs. For that activity, a sifter helped them. Apothecaries did not limit their activities to receiving drugs from overseas but did also the shipment of medicines, prepared in Rouen, to be sailed in American islands i.e. Haiti or St Kitts. These medicines were convoyed to the other side of the Ocean by surgeons working on boats. Rouen proved to be a place for exchanges of drugs from both sides of the Ocean.

[Pharmaceutical practice in Bahia in the latter half of the 19th century]

The nineteenth century brought the progressive demarcation of the professions devoted to the healing arts in Brazil, with a emphasis on rights and responsibilities. Academic medicine made a growing distinction between those who prescribed medicine and those who engaged in making or selling it. The article explores this process, with an emphasis on pharmaceutical practice in the province of Bahia in the latter half of the century. Within this context, it addresses changes and constancies in laws and in their local enforcement as well as relations between pharmacists, on the one hand, and, on the other, the government, physicians, and those who made or sold medicine illegally or without authorization.

Food, drugs, and droods: a historical consideration of definitions and categories in American food and drug law

This Article explores the evolution and interaction of the legal and cultural categories "food" and "drug" from the late nineteenth century to the present. The federal statutory definitions of "food" and "drug" have always been ambiguous and plastic, providing the FDA with significant regulatory flexibility. Nevertheless, the agency is not necessarily free to interpret the definitions however it chooses. "Food" and "drug" are not only product classes defined by food and drug law, but also fundamental cultural concepts. This Article demonstrates that the FDA, as well as Congress and the courts, have operated within a constraining cultural matrix that has limited their freedom to impose their preferred understandings of these categories on American society. Nonetheless, history also provides ample evidence that lawmakers possess substantial power to mold the legal categories of "food" and "drug" so as to advance desired policies. One explanation for this regulatory flexibility in the face of deep-seated cultural conceptions is the indeterminate nature of the extralegal notions of "food" and "drug." The terms, as commonly understood, embrace nebulous, overlapping, and constantly evolving realms. Moreover, the relationship between culture and law is not a one-way street with respect to these categories. Although the regulatory apparatus has always had to take into account the extralegal understandings of "food" and "drug," the law in turn has exerted significant influence over their meaning in broader culture.

[Pharmaceutical and parapharmaceutical advertising of Annales vertes in 1927]

The journal Les Annales, under the direction of Adolphe Brisson, was deeply modified by Pierre (Adolphe's son) who decided to publish in 1927 the first issue of Les Annales with a green cover, so called Les Annales vertes. This journal contained a lot of pharmaceutical as well as parapharmaceutical advertising. It is the useful to make an analysis of it at a period which is just preceding the 1929 financial krasch and which is characterized by large advertising budgets in the pharmaceutical industry. Directed toward the general population, advertising was mainly targeting women and patients suffering from anaemia, intestinal transit diseases, or corn. It is also an opportunity to observe the dynamism of some pharmaceutical companies, most of which have disappeared since then. This very large amount of advertising, indeed in excess, will drive ultimately to change the law a few years later in order to control more and more tightly this activity of advertising that targeted the general population as well as medical doctors and pharmacists.

[Ideas on the mode of action and on the specificity of medicines between antiquity and early modern times]

The paper focuses on the modes of action, which medical authors ascribe to medicines, between antiquity and early modern times, mainly on those modes that are described in a sufficiently clear way and are, moreover, based on some fairly general principles. It is proposed that there are four main types of such modes of action: a) by neutralizing opposite qualities, b) by eliminating ("purging") excessive or abnormal humours (or materia peccans), c) by directly attacking the disease entity, d) by acting on (and "normalizing") the "vital principle". For each of these types, the principal characteristics as well as some major variations are presented, with reference to representative authors and texts. It is moreover attempted to determine the extent to which ideas about the specific action of medicines emerge within each of these types and to outline the particular variations these ideas acquire.

Duchess, heal thyself: Elisabeth of Rochlitz and the patient's perspective in early modern Germany

This article uses the case of German noblewoman Elisabeth of Rochlitz as a window on sixteenth-century patient attitudes toward disease and the body. A widowed duchess of Saxony, Elisabeth spent the last twenty years of her life battling an increasingly serious string of illnesses. Despite her ready access to learned physicians and her friendly relationship with several of them, she used a wide variety of practitioners and frequently privileged lower-status healers when she perceived their methods to be more efficacious. She placed the greatest weight on remedies that would relieve the experienced symptoms of her illness, rather than more holistic methods such as doctors' regimens. This perception of disease as a set of symptoms led to a dispute about the meaning of signs in her final illness.

Allied against reform: pharmaceutical industry-academic physician relations in the United States, 1945-1970

During the 1960s, the drug industry was the subject of two congressional investigations into its business practices and pricing policies, and in 1962, passage of the Drug Amendments mandated greater Food and Drug Administration authority over pharmaceutical development. In this article, I examine the industry's efforts to circumvent these political challenges by drawing on its longstanding relationship with academic physicians and the American Medical Association. Using the medical profession's shared concern about expanding government oversight over therapeutic practice, the industry called on academic physicians to join forces with it and establish an expert advisory body to guide government officials on pharmaceutical policy. Drawing on research in the archives of the University of Pennsylvania and the National Academy of Sciences and a careful reading of the trade and biomedical literature and congressional documents, I argue that by positioning themselves as pharmaceutical experts, the members of this industry-academic alliance gave industry a seat at the policy table and enabled it to challenge the efforts of pharmaceutical reformers to further increase the government's role in drug development.

[Medical prescription from "Libro de' segreti cavato da molti mastri di cristali et da altri hominij literati" Danzica 1645 (MS.5461 della Biblioteca Casanatense di Roma]

In the Casanatense Library - Rome, few years ago, a manuscript was found, written in Danzig in 1645, containing a great number of glass recipes but also recipes of alchemic and metallurgical subject and about forty recipes of practical medicine. If the generality of recipes were published in 2004, the medical recipes are here transcribed and commented with the help of experts in pharmaceutical chemistry and in medicine history. The medicine recipes of the manuscript are typical of the therapeutic technique in use in the 17th century, deriving from an empirical knowledge and from a magic-popular heritage that accompanied the medical doctrine till modern era.

[Magic bullets, chemical gagging, controlled risks? On the research of the network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th century" of the German Research Foundation (DFG)]

Therapeutic substances, their development, testing, application and effects, have in recent years become a central topic of the history of medicine, history of science, and science and technology studies. This paper provides an overview of the literature on this topic through the four-fold perspective of individual substances, industry, patients, and regulation. It introduces the recently established, DFG-funded research network "Pharmaceuticals in the 20th Century" and sketches current methodological approaches to the history of therapeutic substances. At present it appears to be particularly promising to adopt an approach which uses substances or groups of substances as a heuristic device for exploring their complex networks and interdependencies.

[Experta--the first society specializing in scientific evaluation of medicaments]

The Experta Company, specializing in scientific evaluation of medicaments, was founded in the city of Brno in 1933. Its main task was to control medicaments and mass-produced medicinal preparations, the so-called specialties, offered for their evaluation by pharmaceutical factories. The specialties were analysed using chemical, pharmacological, pharmaceutical, and biological methods. The analyses took place in the laboratories of the Medical Faculty and the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Masaryk University in Brno, and also at the College of Veterinary Surgeons in Brno. The main aim of Experta was to confirm and openly show that the composition of specialties is safe and that the medicaments could be trusted by doctors once evaluated and marked by an Experta mark. The company also made an attempt to prove that medicaments produced in our homeland are equal to those produced abroad, and hereby to support medical prescriptions of Czechoslovak remedies. All the steps taken by Experta were to contribute to economic cost savings of not only our state and health insurance companies but also to those of the patients themselves. Officially the Experta Company came to an end of its existence in 1948; however, the clouds over it darkened earlier, before the Second World War broke out. Despite the fact that Experta existed for only a relatively short period of time and that it did not implement all its aims, its conception and attempts to create in Czechoslovakia in 1934-1948 an independent controlling institute for medical specialties were remarkable and progressive (especially the emphasis on biological control of specialties).

History of cannabis and its preparations in saga, science, and sobriquet

Cannabis sativa L. is possibly one of the oldest plants cultivated by man, but has remained a source of controversy throughout its history. Whether pariah or panacea, this most versatile botanical has provided a mirror to medicine and has pointed the way in the last two decades toward a host of medical challenges from analgesia to weight loss through the discovery of its myriad biochemical attributes and the endocannabinoid system wherein many of its components operate. This study surveys the history of cannabis, its genetics and preparations. A review of cannabis usage in Ancient Egypt will serve as an archetype, while examining first mentions from various Old World cultures and their pertinence for contemporary scientific investigation. Cannabis historians of the past have provided promising clues to potential treatments for a wide array of currently puzzling medical syndromes including chronic pain, spasticity, cancer, seizure disorders, nausea, anorexia, and infectious disease that remain challenges for 21st century medicine. Information gleaned from the history of cannabis administration in its various forms may provide useful points of departure for research into novel delivery techniques and standardization of cannabis-based medicines that will allow their prescription for treatment of these intractable medical conditions.

The Development of Drug Metabolism Research as Expressed in the Publications of ASPET: Part 1, 1909–1958

This is the first of three articles covering the development of drug metabolism research in the United States during the first 100 years of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). Before 1909, the majority of drug metabolism research was performed in Europe. The period from 1909 to 1958 saw extensive development of the methods required for modern metabolism studies. Examples of trends and specific discoveries are drawn from the archives of ASPET publications.

Current issues with beta2-adrenoceptor agonists: historical background

The discovery that dessicated adrenal glands had beneficial effects in asthma arose in 1900 following a vogue for studying organotherapy at the end of the 19th century. The adrenal hormone adrenaline was found to have sympathomimetic properties and was isolated and synthesized in 1901. The first nonselective beta-agonist, isoproterenol, was isolated in 1940, followed by the development of selective beta2-agonists in the 1960s and the introduction of the long-acting beta2-agonists in the 1990s. The introduction of beta2-selectivity reduced adverse effects, as did developments in inhaler technology that allowed subjects to inhale much smaller doses of drug selectively to the airways. The beta2-agonists are some of the more important drugs to have been developed in the 20th century. Excessive doses can cause problems, and attempts to maximize the benefit from beta2-agonists and to reduce adverse effects has led to considerable epidemiological, clinical, and mechanistic research over the last 50 yr.