Something New at the Apothecary Shop
The menu at your local drugstore didn't change much over the years, with only a few things being
added as the centuries rolled on, and the old treatments were passed from a village
midwife
to her daughter, or from an
apothecary
to his apprentice. Some of these remedies were effective. Hot peppers
are very good for numbing mouth pain. Some were useful but had dangerous side effects. Opium,
made from poppies, knocked out pain but was powerfully addictive. Still others were useless,
and even harmful. Smoking tobacco leaves was advised by one writer in the 1500s to relieve
pain.
So in the early 1800s, people started to use new kinds of pain relievers. Chemists began to separate the active compounds in medicinal plants and use the refined compounds to treat pain. In the middle of the 1800s, some scientists even began to create new chemical compounds not found in nature. Since chemists were putting atoms together to make new molecules, these medicines were called synthetic drugs.
 An apothecary shop in the 1800s. |  A label from an opium package. |
But the medicines themselves weren't the only thing changing. In the 1800s selling medicines was becoming big business. Medications were now being mass produced instead of being prepared one dose at a time by a village midwife or the owner of a small apothecary shop. But one thing hadn't changed. There was no way to know which medicines worked and which didn't, short of trying all of them yourself. There was no Food and Drug Administration to make sure that only safe and effective medications were sold. So there were lots of bogus remedies mixed in with the effective ones. The 1800s in North America was the age of snake oil, the so-called patent medicines.
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Image credits:
-
A label from an opium package: Courtesy Marvin Samson Center for the History of
Pharmacy, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.
An apothecary shop in the 1800s: Courtesy Marvin Samson Center for the History of Pharmacy, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.