The historiography of twentieth-century pharmaceuticals has, for a long time, shown a strong bias in favour of narratives that focus on the alliance between chemistry and industry, on the generalization of molecular screening and on the trajectories of synthetic drugs. Nonetheless, recent work in the field reminds us that therapeutic preparations based on biological entities, i.e. animals' bodies and plants, dominated the world of pharmacy until the Second World War, that is to say, long after industrial specialties had begun to flood the drug market. Assumptions that equate the rise of chemicals with the industrialization of therapeutic agents are therefore of little use if one seeks to understand the dynamics of drug innovation and standardization that characterized the first half of the twentieth century.

The period was indeed a time of major transformation in pharmacy. This reordering involved the gradual marginalization of the professional regime of drug invention, production and use – a regime associated with the figure of the pharmacist as an expert in materia medica, i.e. in all the substances and remedies deemed professionally legitimate and included in the national pharmacopoeia, and which the pharmacist knew how to prepare. As the number of ready-made specialties grew, this pharmacist was slowly replaced by two figures: that of the apothecary turned retailer, and that of the (much more prestigious) industrial entrepreneur, who owned factories that, increasingly, were coupled with in-house laboratories.