Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  1 
April,  1876.  j 
The  Pill  Subject. 
161 
This  critic  complains,  firstly,  that  a  pill  made  with  glycerin  as  an 
excipient,  is  not  a  fair  criterion  of  the  uncoated  ready-made  pill  of  our 
day.  In  reply  to  this  the  writer  would  say  that  he  has  taken  the  trou- 
ble to  inquire  of  a  number  of  pharmacists  as  to  the  excipient  used  by 
them  for  pills  which  they  expect  to  keep  for  a  greater  or  lesser  length 
of  time,  and  he  finds  that  the  majority  use  glycerin,  either  by  itself  or 
in  combination,  and  the  reason  is  obvious — to  keep  the  pill  in  a  soft  or 
friable  condition,  so  as  to  secure  ready  disintegration,  and  the  belief 
that  this  method  of  making  a  pill,  represented  the  best  kind  of  ready- 
made  pill  of  our  day,  has  been  further  confirmed. 
He  states,  secondly,  "  that  he  should  have  given  the  preference  to  the 
compressed  pills,  as  it  appears  in  his  tables  that  they  were  the  only  ones  dis- 
solved;  all  the  others  were  only  disintegrated. 
This  statement  in  point  of  fact  is  not  correct,  as  a  glance  at  my 
table  will  show,  the  word  dissolved  having  been  used  twice,  not  in  rela- 
tion to  compressed  pills,  but  in  the  last  column  of  the  Pil.  Quiniae 
Sulph.  table  the  word  will  be  seen  twice,  connected  with  the  plain  and 
sugar-coated  pill. 
The  reason  the  word  was  used  at  all,  in  alluding  to  the  compressed 
quinia  pill,  is  simply  because  this  form  of  quinia  pill  could  not  possibly, 
under  the  circumstances,  be  forced  to  disintegrate.  is  a  hard  mass, 
and  it  is  its  habit  to  dissolve  slowly  from  the  outside,  the  pill  growing 
smaller  and  smaller  until  it  finally  disappears,  whilst  the  plain  and 
sugar-coated  pills  usually  disintegrated  quickly. 
The  disintegration  of  the  pill  must  soon  be  followed  by  solution  or 
digestion,  if  the  stomach  contains  any  fluids  (as  most  stomachs  do),  and 
the  mass  of  which  the  pill  is  composed  is  capable  of  being  acted  upon. 
The  next  complaint  is,  "In  the  case  of  the  uncoated  compound  cathar- 
tic pill,  Mr.  Remington  uses  the  indefinite  and  impractical  expression  of 
Gone  in  fifteen  minutes.  This  implies  a  perfect  solution  of  the  pill,  and 
when  we  take  the  ingredients  into  consideration,  we  know  that  they  cannot 
be  wholly  dissolved  in  a  weak  alkaline  solution. 
My  friend  has  been  led  astray  again.  Here,  the  expression  "  Gone 
in  15  minutes"  expresses  the  fact  exactly.  The  pill,  as  a  pill,  was 
gone.  My  table  has  it,  Plain  uncoated  pill,  gone  in  15  minutes.  It 
had  disappeared.  There  is  no  warrant  whatever  for  his  statement  that 
a a  perfect  solution  of  the  pill  was  implied"  and  the  only  object  of  using 
this  admittedly  odd  expression  was  to  avoid  the  incorrect  one  of  dis- 
solved. 
1 1 
