What was a drugstore like in medieval Europe?

Europeans in the Middle Ages were no strangers to diseases and plagues. When suffering from health problems, they did the same as people today: They looked to medicine in the hope for a cure, or at least for the easing of pain. People bought, ingested, or applied items that are still familiar—potions, ointments, and pills.

The chemistry of such medication, however, was very different, made from natural substances once believed to have curative, even miraculous, properties. These included precious stones (agate was a remedy for eye complaints, while jasper was thought to counter hemorrhoids); mineral waters; products derived from animals or even humans (nails, urine, blood); and, above all, a great variety of plants.

A pharmacopoeia called De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscorides was widely circulated both in the medieval West and the Arab and Muslim world. It included botanical descriptions and medicinal applications for hundreds of plants. Certain plants were credited with a wide range of curative properties. According to Dioscorides, the cyclamen plant can be made into a potion and used to treat everything from jaundice and headaches to constipation, chilblains, acne, and alopecia. Spice merchants (épiciers in French, speziali in Italian) had close ties with apothecaries, as some of the spices they traded from the East were believed to have medicinal properties. Cinnamon and anise, for example, were used to prevent bad breath.

Lotions, potions, and poultices would sometimes be prepared by itinerant healers who sold their wares in the streets or door-to-door. But there were also dispensaries called apothecaries (from the Greek word meaning “storehouse”), the precursors of modern pharmacies and drugstores.

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Monk hospital

The origin of these apothecaries is closely linked to convents, monasteries, and abbeys. Monastic foundations often had places where they could offer hospitality to pilgrims and the poor. Since many of those using these houses, called hospitals, were also sick, the monks sought ways to treat their ailments, and so the word “hospital” acquired its modern sense Monks were suited to be physicians. They had access to scientific books in their libraries, such as the treatise by Dioscorides, and many other texts in circulation in medieval Europe and the Muslim world. They also had the physical resources. Based on their knowledge, monks knew which medicinal plants to cultivate in their monastery gardens.

In this way, the first pharmacies were established as distinct rooms or spaces. In Camaldoli, east of Florence, in the 11th century, a monk named Romuald founded a community of Benedictine monks who ran a hospital for the poor. The pharmacy at Camaldoli was referenced as early as 1048. Sixteenth-century sources describe the provision of medicinal herbs from the well-stocked botanical garden.

Another example, also in Italy, is the Dominican convent built in 1221 in Florence next to the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, built later. When the the friars healed a wealthy Florentine merchant, the fame of the friars’ pharmacy spread to the general public, who flocked to its doors, making Santa Maria Novella a Renaissance-era precursor to the modern drugstore.

The division of the role between doctor and apothecary began to harden in the 13th century, coinciding with the rise of guilds for physicians. Since physicians considered preparing medicines to be beneath their dignity, apothecaries took on this task. The Constitutions of Melfi were promulgated in Sicily in 1231 by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily. They established that physicians were not to prepare remedies but only prescribe them. Conversely, apothecaries could not prescribe remedies but only prepare them, and always under the supervision of a physician.

(Why plague doctors wore those strange beaked masks)

At times apothecaries would push the limits of their practice. In Paris in 1281, the statutes of the Faculty of Medicine clamped down on apothecaries and forbade them to visit the sick or dispense any medicine without a prescription from a physician.

Guilded Age

The rise of guilds subjected apothecaries’ work to regulation by law. In 1353 royal statutes governing the Guild of Spice Merchants-Apothecaries of Paris established that no one could practice as an apothecary “if he did not know how to read prescriptions or had no one who knew how to do so.” The selling of “poisonous or dangerous medicines” was outlawed, and labeling bottles with the year and month the remedy had been prepared was made obligatory. In addition, apothecaries were urged to sell their products “at a loyal, fair, and moderate price.” To monitor compliance with the rules, a master of apothecaries was appointed and, assisted by two physicians appointed by the dean of the Faculty of Medicine, inspected each apothecary’s shop at least twice a year,“carefully examining all the substances to be found therein.”

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Women in medicine

Despite evidence of women physicians in antiquity, the idea of women as druggists, pharmacists, and physicians generated hostility in Europe’s male-dominated medical guilds. Attempts were made to restrict women’s medical activities to midwifery.

Nevertheless, women’s traditional roles as caregivers provided them with the knowledge to work as healers. In 17th-century England, reflecting a surge in female literacy, it became fashionable for women to compile books of receipts, or recipes, detailing how to make remedies for a range of conditions (only later were recipes associated with food). One of the best known such writers was the late 17th-century English author Hannah Woolley. In The Gentlewoman’s Companion, attributed to Woolley, she associated the work of pharmacist and physician with upward social mobility, and urged women to acquire competent skills in “Physick and Chyrugery [medicine and surgery]” as a means to attain social “usefulness.”

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Among the Quaker colonists who set sail from England for America with William Penn in 1682 were women skilled in medicine and healing. The knowledge they passed on to their fellow settlers would prove a crucial public service in the daily life of the colony that became Pennsylvania.