[The way for carrying medicine and its containers (XI): "dosage form of patent medicine in the Edo Period"].

In the Edo period, there was a prescribed medicine and a patent one. The former was liquid preparation to be decocted and the latter was solid one. It took a lot of time to prepare a decoction medicine and it was troublesome work. A scene where a person was preparing a decoction medicine in a tumble-down house for a patient was often described in literature of the Edo period to express that they have a serious patent by a novelist. On the other hand, a solid preparation was handy to carry it and convenient for taking so that it was accepted by customers.