| Our recent discovery of a book entitled ‘The pharmacist’,
by German writer Ingrid Noll, offered an opportunity to examine the position
of the pharmacist in literature. Often associated with liberal and progressive
ideas, the pharmacist and the apothecary boast a long if subtle presence
in fiction. Romeo’s last words — “O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die!” — offer an
intriguing insight into what is, perhaps, the most striking aspect of
the role that creative writing
reserves for the profession: supplying poison for suicide and murder.
Shakespeare’s druggist cuts a sorrowful figure. Lauded by Romeo,
today he might have been found among the reports from Statutory Committee
hearings: an outcast living in poverty, persuaded to sell deadly venom
in defiance of law and morality so as to alleviate his own abysmal plight.
His appearance is a model of both decadence and despair:
In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples. Meagre were his looks:
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;
His shop is a disorganised bazaar of the strange and useless; from the
ceiling,
… a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff’d, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes.
While on the shelves one sees
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses,
… thinly scattered to make up a show.
Madame Bovary’s Homais wins the Légion
d’honneur
|
In contrast to Shakespeare’s miserable apothecary, Gustave Flaubert’s
pharmacist, Homais (in ‘Madame Bovary’), is rather
better served, apparently demonstrating
improvements in the profession’s standing over time:
The devil himself doesn't have a greater following than the pharmacist:
the authorities treat him considerately, and public opinion is on his
side.
Despite the crushing irony and scepticism that dominates the French
novel, Homais
is perhaps the only character to emerge
unscathed. While suicides, ruination and
early deaths dominate the close of the
work, Homais finds himself winning the
Légion d’honneur for his scientific works. Throughout, he
is portrayed as liberal, progressive and, most characteristically, an
anticlerical atheist whose disbelief is based firmly on post-enlightenment
scientific principles:
I can’t admit of an old boy God who takes walks in his garden
with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales,
dies uttering a cry, and rises again after three days; things absurd
in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws.
Nevertheless, it is Homais’s lack of care with controlled drugs
that contributes directly to the tragic denouement of the novel, as the
protagonist Emma Bovary sneaks her way into the inner sanctum of the
pharmacy and steals the poison with which she kills herself.
In the Americas, a similar admixture of liberalism, desperation and negligence
can be found in the portrayal of the profession. Hunter S. Thompson remarked
that his title “Dr” — in fact a Doctorate in Divinity
awarded him by a mail order church in the late 1960s — enabled
him to source prescription drugs from pharmacists, an important part
of his wild mind-altering experiments in ‘Fear and loathing in
Las Vegas’. Further south in Uruguay, Juan Carlos Onetti’s
novel ‘Bodysnatcher’ features a pharmacist, Barthe, as a
key figure in a small town’s progressive liberal faction, promoting
such notable social measures as the introduction of a legalised and regulated
brothel in the town, the emergence of which unchains the scandals and
confrontations that drive the story. Barthe, it is perhaps also worth
mentioning, is the only gay character in the piece.
From nearby Argentina, Julio Cortazar’s pioneering experimental
novel ‘Hopscotch’ of the 1960s offers a distinctly
understated and underwhelming
portrayal of the pharmaceutical profession. Talita, the pharmacist, spends
most of her time being gently mocked by her intellectual colleagues Traveler
and Oliveira, who somewhat inexplicably find themselves working alongside
the pharmacist as warders in an asylum for the insane. As Traveler wryly
observes on being given a suppository by the girl he may or may not be
in love with, “a pharmacist serves the truth even if it is found
in the most intimate places”. Throughout, Talita’s practical
professionalism stands in contrast to the imaginative and creative intellectual
theatricals of her colleagues. Cortazar’s pharmacist, while ever-competent,
is neither inspiring nor of great interest among the collection of bohe-mians
and madmen that people the novel.
Which brings us back to Ingrid Noll’s 1994 euro-thriller, translated
into English by Ian Mitchell and brought to the screen by director Rainer
Kaufmann in 1997. The plot is typical of Noll’s dark yet subtle
feminist thrillers: Hella Moorman, a 30-something pharmacist, is recounting
her life story so far to fellow inpatient, the aged Frau Hirte, in a
German hospital. Hella’s love life had been a series of disasters
brought on by her affinity for losers and hopeless cases, until she meets
an attractive young dental student and heir to a small fortune. Yet her
new lover, Levin, is a young man with a past and she soon finds herself
mixed up with drug runners, junkies and murder.
As a pharmacist, Hella faces issues typical of the profession in any
country. She struggles to complete a PhD to further her employability
while trying to keep up a successful
career. As a character, she displays traits that seem typical in the
literary portrayal of the pharmacist: from an early age she mixes up
her own lotions and potions; she is a hard-working, slightly dull over-achiever;
she is a well-organised hoarder, almost compulsively neat; and she is
house- and shop-proud, organising her plants and her herbs and spices
as one would order a well-managed dispensary.
Noll touches on a number of issues significant to the profession, such
as addiction to antipsychotics and the danger of robbery in search of
drugs. However, the conclusion of the novel sees the recurrence of a
trope: the tendency for the literary pharmacist to be involved in poisoning.
It seems that the literary world cannot trust pharmacists with drugs
yet. Perhaps writers are all too aware of the origins of the profession’s
name: pharmakon — both cure and poison.
|
The
Pharmaceutical Journal