Page 19 - Pharmacy History 29 Nov 2006

Old pharmacy furnishings By Geoff Miller
The drug run
The British pharmacy historian, Leslie Matthews in his book, Antiques of
the Pharmacy makes a brief reference to the chests of drawers with their distinctive name plates and crystal glass drawer knobs, which are generally known as a Drug Run (except in South East-Asia!).
Matthews states that ‘the practice of having boxes, oval or rectangular, and nests of drawers on the front of which pictures of herbs were painted, with their names, may have come from a suggestion made by Jean de Renou
in Paris about the year 1608. In his textbook on the practice of pharmacy he recommended the best plan for a pharmacy and the use of boxes round and deep: those that stood by the shop door should be adorned with pictures on the front, space being left for lettering the name in gold’.
Not many elaborately decorated boxes or drawers, common in the eighteenth century, can be seen in any but the very oldest pharmacies today,
although there are still many in the older hospital pharmacies in France and Italy, decorated with paintings of landscapes, flowers, plants.
This is a picture of a magnificent set of custom-built drawers with hand- painted labels, which is the decorative feature in the boardroom of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia in Guild House, Canberra.
To open a drawer in one of these pieces of furniture and to embrace the pervasive smell of the long gone contents, is one of the delights of going into a really old pharmacy.
The names of the contents of the drawers were usually in Latin, and this would add to the mystery of the pharmacist’s art. As well as hand- painted names applied directly to the drawer fronts., strips of mirrored glass stuck to the drawer fronts were also very popular.
These names tell us about the huge range of dried plants, seeds and
roots that were commonly sold in a pharmacy, for use as the ingredients of home remedies and recipes,
which were handed down through family generations.
There were the common chemicals like Sulphur, Magnesium Carbonate, Castille Soap etc, but the more exotic vegetable drugs usually made up the pot-pourri of smells.
To take a few examples from the drawers in the picture. There is Brassica Alba and Nigra ( the white and black mustard seeds), Sem Carvi (Carraway seeds), Chondrus Crispus (a lichen better known as Carrageen or Irish Moss) and so on.
The whole reads like the index of a pharmacognosy text book!
A drug run is a very collectable piece and it adds real atmosphere to any display featuring historical pharmacy objects.
volume 3 ■ no 25 ■ March 2005
Pharmacy History Australia ■ 19