Latin pila, ball, diminutive pilula, entered English by 1400 through Dutch and French: the medicine rolled into a swallowable globe, with the dictionary's delicious note that pila may relate to pilus, hair, the original notion perhaps hairball. The figurative career is documented early, a bitter pill from the 1540s, the disagreeable person by 1871, the pill, contraceptive, from 1957. The gilding is documented practice, not just idiom: apothecaries coated pills in gold and silver leaf, the precious metals believed medicinal in themselves, the mercury-gilded pill being the dangerous deluxe version, and gild the pill entered the language as the act of making the unacceptable swallowable.
The pill's big brother is the bolus, Greek bolos, a clod or lump, the large-dose form for horses, still the word for a rapid injection, and the pair maps the whole dosage politics: little balls for ladies, clods for horses, the size of the pellet calibrated to the status of the patient. The veterinary file is where the gilding never applied, the horse getting the lump straight, which the archive reads as the honest end of the dosage spectrum: no coating, no metaphor, just the clod and the gag reflex.
The claim: gild the pill is the archive's pharmacopoeia wing's summary of all packaging, the coating as the first user-experience design, every subsequent coating, sugar, film, enteric, branding, marketing, the news itself, being gold leaf by other means, the bitter substance unchanged beneath, and the modern red-pill idiom the gilding's inversion, a pill marketed on its bitterness, truth sold as the one uncoated dose. Verdict: the gold-leaf record and the idiom's history support it. The archive notes the red pill's own irony: it arrived branded, film-coated, and franchise-licensed. The Romans rolled the ball. The apothecary gilded it. The marketers bought the gold mine. The ball rolls on, little, round, and mostly hair.
If the pill is a little ball and the bitter one needs gilding, what exactly is the coating made of, and who pays for the gold?