Medical and Pharmaceutical Manuscript in French, ca. 1672-1729:
A Unique Resource—Its Place in the Lloyd Library and the History of French Pharmacy

By Maggie Heran
Lloyd Director

Reprinted from Lloydiana, Volume 14, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2010, pages 14-15

The Lloyd recently acquired a 17th/18th century French manuscript containing pharmaceutical remedies and other medical advice. However, before describing this readable and useful manuscript, it is important to situate it within the context of French pharmacy history, as well as describe its relationship to other French pharmacy historical research materials in the Lloyd Library collection. The dates of the manuscript, ca. 1672-1729, put its creation toward the end of a centuries-old dispute between apothecaries and spicers. In early modern France apothecaries had difficulty clarifying their status as medical because they were so often grouped in the same guilds with grocers and spicers whose status was strictly mercantile and not at all medical.

Even as the apothecaries began to distance themselves from the mercantile trades, the physicians sought to undermine their business. In 1625, Parisian doctors published Le Médicin Charitable, a pharmaceutical handbook whose purpose was to offer information by which lay people could become their own apothecaries, thereby putting the druggists out of work. Although early efforts to raise the status of apothecaries can be found, such as the College of Apothecaries founded in Montpellier in 1572 that separated spicers and grocers from apothecaries by virtue of education, as well as the establishment of prestigious apothecary corporations, it was 1777 before a royal decree in Paris established the Collége de Pharmacie, finally separating the apothecaries from the mercantile trades. However, the physicians, who held sway, never fully granted independence to the apothecaries.

Despite the precarious status of the apothecaries, in the 17th century important books were being published in France and throughout Europe by both learned academics and experienced, well-trained druggists that helped establish apothecaries as pharmacists and scientists, especially as chemists and botanists. The Lloyd Library holds a wealth of these published sources, all of which would offer an interesting comparative study of published information versus the French manuscript of apothecaries' recipes featured in this article. Seventeenth century works such as Traité Universel des Drogues Simples, written by French chemist Nicolas Lémery, and Histoire Generale des Drogues - in English, A Complete History of Drugs, written by Pierre Pomet, the chief druggist to the King of France, among a host of others, are all available to students and scholars interested in comparing the published record to what contemporary apothecaries were writing in their own recipe books.

The manuscript that is the subject of this article, for instance, gives a series of predominantly herbal remedies, often mixed with white wine and other ingredients such as lard, the skin of hare, and egg whites. Remedies include aids and cures for gonorrhea, gangrene, ulcers, hemorrhoids, toothache, fevers, colic, epilepsy, jaundice, dysentery, gall stones, migraine, vomiting, and plague. Interspersed are a number of recipes for herbal teas, observations of the moon, and a section on Chinese roots and their virtues. A small section relates the parts of the body to star signs. As can be seen from the reproduction of the manuscript's first page at the top of page 15, it is written in ink, in a neat and legible 18th-century cursive. The book contains 536 numbered recipes and an alphabetical index.

For those students and scholars interested in French pharmacy history, the Lloyd holds not only the above-mentioned primary resources from early modern France, but also unique materials on 19th-century French pharmacy. The French Pharmacy archival collection donated to the Lloyd by Alex Berman, a scholar of the history of pharmacy, medicine, and science, consists of 383 folders, 113 of which stress the role of the French pharmacist as scientist. The remaining 270 folders are devoted to biographies of distinguished French pharmacists notable for their scientific or professional contributions, including such luminaries as Nicolas Lémery, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, Jean-Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, and Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, whose publications can be found in the Lloyd collection. The contents of the folders comprise Berman's research material that he collected to document French pharmacy during the period 1777 to 1900. There are articles by Berman and other scholars, as well as articles by some of those notable French pharmacists mentioned above, and other resources such as hospital formularies, pamphlets, photographs, and Berman's notes, manuscripts, and typescripts. Although the collection is not yet organized, there is a folder-level inventory that can be used by researchers.

In addition to the Berman collection, the Lloyd holds nearly fifty 19th-century French dissertations on such topics as opium, cocoa, foxglove, tannin and its use in the research of vegetable alkaloids, quinine, orchids, honey, and cinnamon. For those interested in the topic of French pharmacy history, from almost any era, the Lloyd Library is the place to find rare and unique resources that will support many such areas of research.