James and Randy: minimum civ size and medicines

[mindstalk]

Regarding some recent threads[1] on their LJs, and Stross's blog, about how few people you need to maintain modern or early modern civilization, I ran across this today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Medicines
Kind of long. Even if one choose to amateurishly prune the list (does a society need aspirin and ibuprofen, or all that many antiseptics?) there's still a whole lot of *categories*. Of course, a good chemist can make more than one drug. Still, I wonder about the expertise and capital to make all those efficiently and safely.

I'm not up for presenting a good list right now, but something like
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/2535169.html?thread=47185153#t47185153
later thread, space colonization
http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/2550738.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html

I so don't have ready-made tags for this post.