White Lab Coats and the Chemist-on-Wheels: the Sovietisation of Hungarian Pharmacy

The sovietisation of the Hungarian economy also brought significant changes in the realm of pharmacy. The pharmaceutical industry and trade was folded into the planned economy as a matter of course, by establishing a centralized volume of production. The same process posed a greater challenge when it came to traditional labour of pharmacists, meaning the manual, mag-istral preparation of medicine. This necessitated the creation of a work environment that ren-dered the pharmacists’ work measurable, and thus subject to centralized norms. They wished to achieve this by increasing specialisation, subdividing labour processes, and creating the condi-tions for the industrial production of medicine. The establishment of new Soviet-type pharma-cies all over the country served this purpose. The suppression of manual medicine production and the support for Taylorian labour organisation can also be interpreted as a curtailing of indi-vidual autonomous work.