122 
Sugar-coated  Pills. 
Am.  Jour.  Pharm, 
Mar  ,  1877. 
amount  of  capital  almost  equal  to  that  required  to  furnish  the  ordinary- 
stock  of  a  small  retail  drug  store. 
If  physicians  and  pharmacists  continue  to  give  their  sanction  and 
encouragement  to  the  popularization  of  every  new-fangled  novelty, 
in  the  shape  of  anybody's  coated  pills,  there  is  no  telling  where  this 
thing  will  end.  They  will  be  likely  to  increase  and  multiply  ad 
infinitum,  until  the  coated  pill  business  will  soon  become  as  great  a 
nuisance  and  as  troublesome  to  pharmacists,  if  not  more  so,  than  the 
"  Elixir  "  business  was,  which  some  members  of  our  profession  com- 
plained so  bitterly  of. 
If  these  pills  were  prescribed  by  the  generic  titles  of  "  compressed  " 
or  "  gelatin-coated,"  without  the  name  of  any  particular  manufacturer 
being  specified,  then  the  trouble  and  annoyance  to  the  pharmacist  would 
not  be  so  great.  Many  of  our  wholesale  manufacturers  of  pharma- 
ceutical products  have  recently  engaged  in  the  manufacture  of  both 
compressed  and  gelatin-coated  pills,  and  as  many  more,  I  have  no  doubt„ 
will  soon  enter  these  tc  fresh  fields  and  pastures  new,"  and  if  the  thing 
takes,  there  is  no  telling  how  many  more  will  get  at  it.  And  all,  of 
course,  anxious  to  introduce  their  particular  make  of  pills,  will  flood  the 
entire  domain  of  both  physic  and  pharmacy  with  circulars  to  induce 
physicians  to  prescribe  and  pharmacists  to  buy  their  products.  So,  as  I 
have  said,  if  we  are  to  keep  a  full  assortment  of  everybody's  make  of 
compressed  and  gelatin-coated  pills,  in  addition  to  our  regular  and 
staple  sugar-coated  stock,  what  are  we  to  do  ?  It  will  soon  be  neces- 
sary for  us  to  not  only  increase  our  capital  stock,  but  also  to  enlarge  our 
places  of  business  to  afford  increased  accommodations  for  their  storage. 
I  have,  in  common,  no  doubt,  with  many  others  of  my  brethren^ 
already  experienced  a  foretaste  of  the  inconvenience  and  trouble  that 
the  advent  of  these  new  varieties  of  pills  are  likely  to  cause.  Every 
once  in  a  while  we  receive  a  prescription  for  somebody's  compressed 
or  gelatin-coated  pills,  which  perhaps  are  for  some  impecunious  indi- 
vidual who  possibly  has  hardly  the  means  to  buy  bread,  and  we  are 
compelled  to  send  out  to  some  remote  pharmacist,  whose  peculiar 
location  gives  him  sufficient  demand  for  these  sporadic  pharmacals  to 
warrant  him  keeping  a  stock  of  them  on  hand.  We  there  procure 
these  pills,  and  pay  so  high  a  price  for  them  that  we  are  obliged,  in  the 
majority  of  cases,  to  charge  almost  the  same  price  for  them  without 
any  compensation  for  our  trouble  and  annoyance.    For  if  we  were  to 
