James Morison and his pills. A study of the nineteenth century pharmaceutical market
secondary literature · 1974
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SUMMARY
The principal scholarly study of the Morison's-pills business, by the pharmacy historian W.H. Helfand. Using British medical tax-stamp records, Helfand reconstructed the scale of the trade; secondary syntheses credit him with the calculation that over a billion of Morison's pills were sold between 1825 and 1849. Cited here for the sales-volume estimate and the economic history of the British College of Health. PMID 11615421 verified against PubMed (record: Helfand, 'James Morison and his pills. A study of the nineteenth century pharmaceutical market', 1974); the journal predates DOI assignment and no DOI or PMC record is listed.
NOTES
W.H. Helfand’s 1974 study in the Transactions of the British Society for the History of Pharmacy is the standard quantitative treatment of Morison’s pills as a commercial phenomenon, built from the medical tax-stamp records. It underpins the figure, repeated in later histories of nineteenth-century quackery, that over a billion pills were sold between 1825 and 1849. The PMID (11615421) resolves on PubMed to the cited article; as a 1974 society-transactions paper it carries no DOI or PMC identifier, which is expected for back-filed older literature.