It used to beusedas a medicine, when medicines consisted of coal tars, snake venoms, opiates, alcohols, and all sorts of other ingredients with some very nasty results from their use.
For instance, misoprostol, a drug used to induce labor, was approved as a Pfizer treatment for pain and inflammation, never as a medicine to beused in childbirth.
Like medicine, drug discovery was described as something that used to be an art but now was a science, and thus amenable to industrialization, and well-positioned to reap the associated benefits: economies of scale, benefits of standardization, robust metrics, etc.