The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 272 No 7299 p621
15 May 2004

Society summary

Museum treasures go out on loan

The museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has loaned a number of historical pharmacy-related items for display in museums in Lichfield, London and Portsmouth to show the important part that medicines have played in daily life during the past 200 years.

Several items have been lent to Erasmus Darwin House, the former Lichfield home of the physician, poet, inventor and botanist Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), whose ‘Zoomania or the Laws of Organic Life’ (1794) outlined many evolutionary ideas 65 years before his grandson Charles published ‘On the origin of species’.

The keepers of Darwin’s house are currently working to add more contemporary objects to their displays to give a better sense of Darwin’s life and work. Items lent by the Society’s museum include a microscope, root cutter and cased bleeding apparatus to illustrate the range of Darwin’s medical interests. Another loan item is a packet of Dr James’s Fever Powder, a popular remedy during the 18th and 19th centuries, which is relevant to the house because Dr James also came from Lichfield. Museum staff are planning a further loan of medical caricatures to contribute to a temporary exhibition at the house later in the year.

A range of exhibits has also been lent to Thomas Carlyle’s House, a National Trust property in Chelsea, London, for its 2004 season. The house was the home of writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane for 47 years until Thomas’s death in 1881. Jane Carlyle’s letters make clear that the varied treatments she undertook for her many illnesses formed a significant part of her daily life.

To help highlight more of her experiences and character, the museum has lent a medicine chest appropriate for the period and a number of shop rounds and medicine chest bottles. Society museum staff also contributed to the house’s volunteers’ day to introduce those working at the property to some of the practices and pharmaceutical treatments of the 1800s.

The third loan is to the D-Day Museum at Southsea, Portsmouth. The Society’s museum has lent a penicillin culture vessel to form part of an exhibition commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day. The vessel was used for small-scale production of penicillin at Oxford in 1941 and 1942 before factory production of large supplies of the drug began in the US in time for the anticipated heavy casualties during the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944.

Briony Hudson, keeper of the Society’s museum collections, says: “The museum plays an important role in providing advice and resources to other museums and heritage sites. Lending these objects is a welcome extension to that role, and we are pleased that items from the collections will add to the experience of visitors to Carlyle’s House, the D-Day museum and Erasmus Darwin’s House. It is also good to collaborate with museums outside London, so that some of our collections are more widely seen.”