Innovation vs. tradition: the election of an european way toward pharmaceutical industrialisation, 19th-20th centuries

Resumo

This paper discusses the scientific and technological factors that coincided in the beginning and in the initial development of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe. Having pointed out the reasons that favoured the initial success of the German chemical pharmaceutical industry, we evaluate the efforts of other countries to occupy the leadership of this industrial sector: from the British trials of business concentration to all the strength of the Swiss as a neutral nation in conflicts of war; a special tractor will be dedicated to the study of the penetration of German industry in France, in particular, in the systems invented by German manufacturers to violate the French protectionist legislation. In concluding, we describe the two industrialization models followed by the pharmaceutical industry during the decades of change of the 19th-20th centuries. We evaluate and explain the social, economic, cultural and, above all, scientific-technical reasons that defined both and discuss the motives that led to the current situation of leadership of the central European model in the pharmaceutical sector