While Christine shopped in the Cloth Hall, I visited the quirky Museum of Pharmacy, part of the Jagiellonian University Medical College. Camouflaged in an historic townhouse on one of Kraków's most heavily touristed streets, it traces the history of potions, powders and pills that Poles have taken to feel better since the Middle Ages. A stained glass window memorializes the use of mortars and pestles.
Scales were often as elegant as they were important.
Some of the instruments reminded me of high school chem lab.
The museum definitely appealed to my inner teenage boy. Pufferfish produce a toxin that can arrest convulsive diseases if taken in the proper dose, or help you commit suicide.
Hornless deer found in Central Asia secrete musk from a gland located between their stomach and genitals which has been used in the production of perfume for nearly as long as humans wanted to smell nice. Pharmacists sold it for use as a stimulant and an aphrodisiac. Don't tell Elon--his spawn already number a dozen!
Pharmacists locked up their stores of arsenic, marked supplies with skulls & crossbones and restricted their sales to reduce murder rates. They also prescribed it to treat syphilis.
It's unlikely you'll find leeches on sale at CVS or Duane Reade any time soon, although they're making a comeback among the alternative medicine crowd. I will never forget the application of the bloodsuckers in The Devils, Ken Russell's 1971 shocker starring Vanessa Redgrave as a nutty nun. Or the time I pulled a couple off my leg during an Australian road trip.
Demand for leeches must once have been high. Look closely and you'll see the Hirudines jar on the front counter of this 19th-century pharmacy. One order of live bloodsuckers coming right up!
Funny story: as a pre-teen in El Paso, I once thought I had killed a baby rattlesnake with a rock in the desert and brought it home, using an open magazine, to my father. Impressed, he put on gloves to examine it more closely. "Dad, you don't need to do that, it's dead already." He ignored me. The snake struck as soon as he picked it up. Oops. He cut off the head, propped its jaws open with a toothpick so the fangs would be visible and plopped it into a clear container filled with alcohol. I kept the evidence of my unresolved Oedipal complex for years, preserved just like these pharmacological specimens!
You probably can date the early influence of marketing on the sale of pharmaceuticals by these colorful bottles.
The museum also pays tribute to Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Roman Catholic druggist who refused to relocate from the Podgórze district when the Nazis established the boundaries of the Jewish ghetto. Yad Vashem gave him Righteous Among The Nations status for his lifesaving efforts on behalf of Jews. Steven Spielberg included his pharmacy in Schindler's List.
Pharmacists often used their attics to dry harvested vegetation from which they extracted the ingredients for their medicines.
More Poland
Gdansk:
Kraków:
No comments:
Post a Comment