William Brockedon, F.R.S. (1787-1854)

Since the early beginnings of medicine there has been a need for convenient dosage forms. The fluids, whether solutions, suspensions or emulsions, were easily administered in measured doses. As for solid single-dose units, pills were developed at an early date, and different kinds are mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus (c. 1500 B. C.). The old Greek physicians and their successors referred to them as catapotium, and as such they are included in the treatise De Medicina by Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. A. D. 30). Such were the available dosage forms until the nineteenth century, when within a span of thirty-three years from 1833 to 1866 were added hard and soft capsules, compressed and moulded tablets, and single-dose injections in ampoules. O f these innovations, the compressed tablet and its modifications were to revolutionize pharmaceutical dispensing practices more thoroughly than any other single introduction (1), and lead eventually to the current widespread use of factory-made pills and tablets. Yet its inventor had no demonstrable connexion with medical and pharmaceutical practices. He was William Brockedon, who invented and patented in 1843 ‘a mode of manufacturing pills and medicated lozenges by causing the materials, when in a state of powder, granulation, or dust, by pressure in dies, so as to solidify the same’ (2). William Brockedon was born in 1787, at Totnes, the son of a watchmaker in comfortable circumstances; the family had owned a mill and other property in the area since the reign of Henry IV (3). The small private school which he attended in Totnes was of no particular merit, but his father amply supplemented his education and instilled in the boy an early taste for scientific and mechanical matters. In later life he proudly remembered his part (‘cutting the fly-pinion out of the solid steel’) in the making of a new clock for the local parish church when he was only about thirteen.