Times Gone By

            During the summer break, as any good child should do, I visited my grandparents in order to assist them in some household chores. Whilst I was there I had the chance to rummage around in their basement where my grandpa has created an extraordinary library of super-old books. Grandpa Rokke, as he is known, showed me one of his oldest books that dated back to 1625 and it talks about the relationship between a patient, a physician and a druggist.

            The leather was falling off the binding and the pages were yellowing but it did give me an insight to how much the pharmacy profession has developed since then. One particular story is of a patient who visits his physician about an ailment to which the doctor advises him to visit a druggist and tells him exactly what remedy to buy. Back then, the available drugs were mostly bottles of mashed up plants, opium and alcohols that were given to try and cure disease. You had to also be aware of street vendors who would sell elixirs and poisons that promised the prolonging of life! With so little knowledge of medicine, it was impossible to be any wiser.

            So, the man bought the remedy from a chemist and was cured. He came down with the illness once more several years later and returned to the chemist to buy the remedy again only this time, it didn’t work. The chemist knew not what to do, for then they just made and sold medicines. The physician scolded the man for not coming to him first! Because the remedy did not work since the man had grown older and the physician told the man to always consult a physician.

            Now, it is the chemist or pharmacist that has all knowledge of the drugs and can assist with curing disease since doctors have such massive workloads. Drugs have become more and more specialised and precise and luckily, you can no longer buy snake oils from travelling street merchants!