Items from the ‘Chemists and Druggists’ collection at Wunderkammer,
Including 1800’s pharmacists bottles with contents, hand-made pills, patents medicines & toiletries.

The history of pharmacy, like so many histories, is a colourful and complex tale.
The pharmacy of today, in which the preparations and doses are standardised and regulated really only came into existence as late as the end of the Victorian Era.
Until that time, pharmacy existed as the varied practices of apothecaries, snake-oil sellers, homeopaths and travelling patent medicine salesmen. It is not surprising then, that one of the main difficulties facing the early medical community both in Australia and overseas was the problem of regulating practitioners. Virtually anyone who laid claim to some kind of medical or pharmaceutical prowess was able to treat patients and sell their wares in the colonies. The wares on offer encompassed preparations as inocuous as eucalyptus oil, addictive as opium tinctures and as dangerous as poisons like arsenic, belladonna and digitalis.

Since Medieval times, the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in England had had some influence over practitioners through education and in the early 1700’s was granted the right to examine would-be chemists and druggists. Apothecaries also performed surgery, however and the traders in proscribed medications were more ‘mixed busineses’ than specialist chemists. The trade cards for ‘chemists and druggists’ from the late 1700’s onwards often included advertisements for other items such as tea and coffee, paints and pigments, medicines for horses and cattle and even fish sauces!
In fact the local chemist was often the village vetinary surgeon, art supplier, and grocer.

As well as the difficulties presented by the plethora of practitioners were the existing problems of proscribed drugs and dosage. Pharmacy in the early nineteenth century was not seen as distinct from any other form of medical practice. It was common for an apothecary to perform surgery such as bleedings, as well as proscribing herbs and complex preparations. Traditional pharmacy had leech jars alongside bottles of poisons, herbs, cocaine, and what we would now know as dietary supplements.
The trend was to massive doses- often pushing the limit of toxicity. Emetics such as rhubarb were used to purge. Reactions such as vomiting, sweating and diarohrea were considered evidence that the drug was effective. Not surprisingly, many patients showed little or no improvement as a result of these treatments. In fact, numerous accounts suggest that many a patient died as a result of the treatment!

It was in reaction to these severe and dangerous proscribing practices that the physician Samuel Christian Hahnemann, from Saxony in Germany, began to formulate an alternate system of treatment. Following the death of Kaiser Leopold II from excessive blood-leting, Hahnemann became determined to find a more humane approach to addressing a patient’s sypmtoms. He invented homeopathy- a system of proscribing in which the principle of “like cures like” was applied using massively dilusted doses. Homeopathy was enormously popular and was almost immediately embraced by practitioners in England and America.
Homeopathy came to Australia in the early 1850’s and had numerous practitioners in Sydney, Melbourne, the Ballarat Goldfields and in Adelaide. These early Australian homeopaths were only able to practice because they had access to a supply of homeopathic medicines prepared by the pharmacist Edward G. Gould & Son, located at Collins St, Melbourne. Being the only homeopathic pharmacist in Melbourne, at a time when homeopathy was at the height of its popluarity, Gould & Son became enormously successful. In 1882 with the addition of two more pharmacists, the firm eventually became the now famous pharmacuetical company Martin & Pleasance.

Homeopathy was widely recognised within the established traditions of medicine until the twentieth century. A report of the Autralian Committee of Inquiry into Homeopathy stated in 1977:

Until about 1940 homeopathy was a commonly accepted and respectable form of therapy, which might still have been included within the ambit of orthodox medicine if the introduction of modern pharmacotherapeutics had not demonstrated its superiority during the 1930’s so clearly.

In Australia the regluation of pharmaceutical practitioners did not come about until 1820, when a Medical Board was established to acertain the competancy of anyone wishing to practice medicine as well as pharmacy. Even this measure, however, did not garrantee safety.
It was this same Medical Board that granted John Tawell, a patent-medicine salesman from England and transported forger, a practising certificate. Tawell opened the first pharmacy in Sydney and established a very successful business. Late in life he retired back to England where he was eventually tried and executed for poisoning his mistress!
The first pharmacists were not all charlatans and criminals of course. In 1844 in Adelaide, Francis Hardy Faulding arrived in Australia from Yorkshire and established a pharmaceutical warehouse, thus becoming the first pharmaceutical wholesaler. Fauldings’ is now a multi-national pharmaceutical manufactorer of the highest repute.

Pharmaceutical parapheranlia has always appealed to collectors, perhaps due to the aesthetic values of their bottles and paper labels. As is the case in many areas of collecting, the most sought after items, which fetch thousands of dollars at auction, such as ceramic leech jars and ornate show-globes have been reproduced to satisfy collectors, and the market is full of fakes. More accesible to the modest collector are jars of patent medecines and pills, pharmacy labels and trade cards, and the paraphernalia of manufactoring such as pill presses, mortar and pestles and measures.

A number of important collections of pharmaceutical material exist in Australia, which are invaluable to collectors for research purposes and of interest to the general public because of the stunning and unusual objects on show.
The most accesible of these for Melburnians is the Savory and Moore Pharmacy at Melbourne University Medical History Museum. The museum is located on the second floor of the Brownless Biomedical Library. It was a working pharmacy in London from 1849 up until 1968, and was donated in its entirety to the Museum by the Welcome Trust in 1971. The pharmacy has been reconstructed to resemble almost identically the original pharmacy as it was in the 1800’s. The walls are filled with bottles containing their original contents, and a number of cabinets show pharmaceutical wares and products from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Wunderkammer would like to thank Anne Brothers, Curator of this collection for her kind help and for allowing us to photograph the Pharmacy.

Bibliography

Paper: History of Homeopathy in Victoria, Dr. Joseph von Moger,
www.usenature.com/homeopath_history_vic.htm

Paper: History of Pharmacy, Goeff Millar, revised Feb 2005
www.psa.org.au/ecms.cfm?id=98

Paper: Homeopathy: Report of the Australian Committee of Inquiry(1977)
www.homeowatch.org/history/australia.htm

Paper: Savory and Moore Pharmacy, Medical History Museum
Courtesy of Anne Brothers, Curator.

The ‘Chemists and Druggists’ Collection is on show at Wunderkammer from Saturday the 9th of April, 2005 and will remain on display until sold.