Pharmacy Museum - Krakow, Poland
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 50° 03.794 E 019° 56.413
34U E 424148 N 5546199
Located in the 15th-century Burgher House at Florianska 25.
Waymark Code: WMQ29Z
Location: Małopolskie, Poland
Date Posted: 12/05/2015
Views: 6
The Museum's website (
visit link) informs us:
"The permanent exhibition of the museum is spread over all five stories - from the cellars to the attic. Lets start from the museum hall. Apart from the bust of Stanislaw Pron, here is a Latin inscription from a 17th century pharmacy. It begins: "Haec domus est Hygieiaâ??" and its full English translation is: "This is a house dedicated by Hygeia to the ill. May all medicaments be pleasant and cure all kinds of illnesses. What the hand of Phoebe (ie, Apollo, the patron of doctors) wisely prescribes, may the apothecary rightly perform. May the Lord in His mercy always take care of our health". Hygeia was the mythical patroness of pharmacy. The last line of the inscription contains an encoded date of the pharmacys foundation. The capital letters can be treated as Roman numerals, for example, M equals 1,000 and D equals 500. Summing the numbers gives the date 1625. Such coding method is called a chronogram (from the Greek word chronos, which means time).
here is a reasonable justification for displaying some of our objects in the cellars. According to the words of Jan Lachs (Dawne aptekarstwo krakowskie - An old Cracow dispensing apothecary): "Under the pharmacy there was a cellar (cellarium in Latin), used for storing materials, which could otherwise quickly decay in a dry compartment or under the influence of light, but not in the presence of moisture and in a dark place - namely wax, oil, etc". Throughout the centuries, wax has been used by apothecaries, not only in the productions of ointments and plasters but also, and in some periods mainly, to manufacture candles - the main source of light in the 17th century. This is why in the 17th century woodcut, placed on the way to the cellars, we see that the apothecary??s attribute is not a vessels or other typical apothecary device, but a candle. The apothecary is on the right hand edge of the cut, dressed in black.
In the first of the two cellars there are old wine barrels. Wine stored in barrels was used by the apothecaries to produce medicinal wines. In apothecaries hand-books from the 16th century there are recipes for wines "suitable for cordial illness", "for pensive and pituitous persons", "against cold", for the wine which is "very useful in pestilent times", "absinthe-flavoured wine, good for stomach catarrh, since it dissipates flatulence, which brings the pain from the phlegm" and "saffron-flavored exhilarating wine removing pensiveness". "