Posted 12 years ago
Ollie
(64 items)
I bought a box of pharmacy equipment...apothegary jars, mortor and pestle, glass funnell and this flat piece of glass with numbers on it at a yard sale. What would this have been used to measure? It is 10 X 10.
Neat stuff, but like to know what I have.
What you have is called a pill tile. Years ago when making medications, a druggist would make what was called a pill mass using raw drug ingredients and fillers. It looked sort of like a dough which would contain a certain amount of the active ingredient. The mass was then rolled out on the flat surface of the pill tile in into a long thin cigar-like shape. This was set across the scale on the pill tile so that it could be cut with a metal spatula into uniform sized pieces. The small pieces which now contained individual measured doses of the medication (there was some basic pharmaceutical math calculations involved to get the correct dose). These pieces where rolled into a ball shape, either by hand or by another tool called a pill rounder or finisher. Sometimes a top coating was then applied to mask the taste with yet another tool called a pill-silverer. Anyway, the pill tile is still in use today when pharmacist have to compound certain prescriptions. Most pharmacies have one. More often now, it is used as a convenient work surface that can easily be cleaned and re-used to mix certain creams and ointments ordered by physicians. The earliest ones were made of porcelain. The older glass ones had the scale etched deeply into the glass, cut with a copper wheel. My guess is that yours is probably 1950s or newer. It looks to have a scale which is lightly etched or frosted on the glass.