The Instituto Médico Nacional (National Medical Institute), established in Mexico City in 1888, was the most important research centre of local medicinal plants used by the general population for therapeutic purposes until its closure in 1915. During this period, the main line of investigation of Mexican pharmacy focused on the plant materia medica, as shown by the various editions of the Mexican pharmacopoeia.

The Institute was originally organised five sections: Natural History, Analytical Chemistry, Experimental Physiology, Clinical Therapeutics, and Medical Geography and Climatology. In 1903 the establishment of a sixth section, i.e., the Department of Industrial Chemistry was proposed, which was inaugurated on 1911. The Institute’s investigators included doctors, pharmacists, and natural historians.

The investigated plants circulated across the various sections, where they were processed into active ingredients and drugs for public health and industrial use. The laboratories of the second and sixth sections quickly became the most important facilities devoted to chemical research at that time. Those laboratories were devoted to the isolation and characterisation of the chemical structure of the purified active ingredients of plants, among other chemical analyses. They further elaborated pharmaceutical preparations, which were then subjected to testing at the third and fourth sections. The staff of those sections, thus, comprised mostly pharmacists, who were also professors at the National School of Medicine, and members of the Mexican Pharmaceutical Society.

The results accomlished by that generation of professionals have no precedents in Mexican history. They published the most comprehensive texts on pharmacology and Mexican materia medica of that time. The pharmacists from the second and sixth sections founded the Mexican Chemical Society in 1910, and were the main promoters of the institutionalisation of chemistry at the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy of the National University of Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century.