Apothecary Inventories and the Global Medical Marketplace

Among the many simple products and medicaments available in apothecaries' shops in centuries past, what can a single item tell us about their stock and their processes of sourcing and mixing medicines? Four inventories of apothecaries' shops from the late-15th to early 17th-century southeastern France can help us answer this question.✱ The first of these inventories records the contents of an apothecary shop belonging to Mathieu Roux, who operated in Marseille at the end of the fifteenth century. Compiled in 1488, his inventory included simples (that is, a singular ingredient rather than a mixture or compound), conserves, jams, syrups, ointments, waters, oils, and powders, with the final section discussing the containers he used in his shop and how they preserved the ingredients he sold. The second inventory is that of Steve Villa, an apothecary operating in Aix-en-Provence in the early sixteenth century. His shop's inventory, compiled in 1506, includes waters, pills, troches or lozenges, simples, oils, ointments, electuaries, powders, and instruments, with the weights of the natural materials measured in ounces and drams.

The third shop inventory, compiled in 1547, is that of Rostaing de Gréoux, an apothecary operating in the town of Manosque, in Provence. The items in this list are separated into twenty categories: waters, syrups in jars, oils in jars, oils in vials, oils in tin bottles, ointments in jars, plasters, conserves in jars, opiate compositions in jars, confides in jars, pills, troches, cordial powders, simples, electuaries, stones or minerals, colors, roots, seeds, simples (for the second time), and instruments of the shop. The inventory also provides the weights of the natural materials, usually given in pounds or ounces. The final apothecary shop was operated by Jacques Figurat in early seventeenth-century Carpentras. His inventory of 1616 resembles de Gréoux’s in its composition, featuring separate sections listing instruments, troches, pills, cordial powders, opiate compositions, electuaries, conserves, syrups, honey compositions, distilled waters, ointments, simples, plasters, and multiple sections entitled “drugs and merchandise.”

All four of these inventories indicate that each apothecary owned a rather well-stocked shop, sourcing ingredients, many of which they shared in common, from Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the New World. However, the contents of their shops provide us with more than just lists of material goods. They also offer a window into how early modern European apothecaries worked, how they conceptualized medicine, and how they understood and organized the materials needed to practice their craft. The items in these inventories, as well as the locations from which they were sourced, are relevant to understanding the practices of Roux, Villa, de Gréoux, and Figurat, as well as their potential alignment with contemporary apothecary shops local and distant. Comparing these inventories side-by-side suggests that globalization, whether in reference to the origin or distribution of natural materials, was standard practice in the early modern world of European pharmacy.

One of the avenues of research opened up by Historical Pharmacopeias is the ability to craft more deliberate comparisons when it comes to medicaments and their uses. This might mean looking for likenesses and variances across geographic area, time period, or type of document. To make sense of the different ways in which the sourcing, mixing, and storing of drugs was organized into the written word, we have come to think of these works as falling into two basic categories: reference pharmacopeias and functional pharmacopeias. Reference pharmacopeias aim to be authoritative and prescriptive concerning the normative and best use of medicines. These might be official pharmacopeias, such as the well-studied Ricettario Fiorentino, or theoretical ones, like the writing of Mesue (which you can read about in this DALME essay). Functional pharmacopeias, on the other hand, paint a picture of the medicinal materials stored in an apothecary’s shop at any one moment. From these real-life inventories, acquisition lists, and receipts of purchase, we gain a sense of what apothecaries actually had, or wanted to have on hand, regardless of what authorities deemed normative. Historical Pharmacopeias therefore provides scholars with the tools to investigate the implementation of theory and standards of practice, as well as their divergences in application. These investigations demonstrate the ingredients and the products in the mixing of medicines as a system of interrelation and concurrence, a system in which little occurred in isolation, a system in which we can observe a long tradition of global medical practices. However, we must also question what it means to be global, to be part of a globalized system.

This essay thus draws the reader’s attention to one item present in all four featured inventories: unguent Agrippa, or “ointment of Agrippa.” This drug, named by association with Agrippa I, was an external remedy commonly used to reduce swelling.✱ Like most ointments, it was produced by crushing and preparing herbs and mixing them with melted fats or oils. However, the process was much more arduous than that.✱ The production of most ointments required several rounds of mixing and boiling ingredients, and then allowing these increasingly complicated mixtures to stand for several days, sometimes even as long as a week or two.✱ In addition, products such as ointments or salves had to be mixed much more frequently, since they used perishable products like animal fat, butter, or cream, as a base.✱ Even so, ointments were popular external remedies.

Alongside the mentions of unguentum Agrippa that we find in these French apothecaries' inventories, in these functional pharmacopeias, we also find appearances of the drug in several reference pharmacopeias produced in medieval France, England, and Italy. These works include Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia Magna (1363); the writings of John Arlene (1307-1370), who noted that the ointment should be white in color; the writings of Gilbertus Angelicus (c. 1180-1250), who noted that the ointment was helpful in reducing swelling of the spleen as well as other parts of the body; and Quiricus de Augustis’ Lumen Apothecariorum (1492), a successful, practical work on the making of medicines influenced by the Galenic and Hippocratic traditions.✱

As we learn from these reference works, several ingredients seem to have remained essential to the preparation of unguentum Agrippa. The medieval English physician Gilbertus Anglicus and the 17th-century English physician John Ward agreed on briony root, squill, iris, and wax.✱ According to John Ward’s diaries, unguentum Agrippa was made using briony root, squill, iris root, dwarf elder, oil, and wax.✱ Most though not all of these ingredients were native to Europe and the Mediterranean region, with iris (Iris, Iris Florentina, Iris foetidissima) and dwarf elder (Sambucus ebulus, Sambucus nigra) originating in Europe and the Mediterranean, squill (Drimia maritima) originating in a small section of the Mediterranean, and briony (bryonia dioica) in Europe and Asia.✱ From the ingredients of one medicament alone, we see how apothecary shops, and the manuscripts crafted for the control or instruction of their practice, were global enterprises

Yet, we still have not exactly defined globality. Are the inventories of Roux, Villa, de Gréoux, and Figurat "global" because they include ingredients from Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the New World? Or are these inventories global because they share ingredients with functional and reference pharmacopeias from various regions? We should therefore think of globality in two ways, as "globality of use," in which apothecary shops used the same simples and manipulated them in a similar manner, and "globality of origin," referring to the far-flung locations from which apothecaries sourced their ingredients. Historical Pharmacopeias creates a space in which these two types of globality can interact with one another, a space in which scholars can engage with the difficulties in conceptualizing early modern apothecaries and the evidence of them that remains.

This essay builds on an excerpt of research explored in an upcoming edition of the Journal of the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. Please tune in to the special issue for more. Particular thanks to Paula de Vos for her advice on how to explore these issues.

Further Reading:

Bouras-Vallianatos, Petros, and Dionysios Stathakopoulos, eds. Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean: Transmission and Circulation of Pharmacological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Breen, Benjamin. The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Courtwright, David T. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Curth, Louise. From Physick to Pharmacology: Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

De Vos, Paula. Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Griffin, Clare. Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia. Intoxicating Histories 4. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.

Lardos, Andreas, Kristina Patmore, Robert Alkin, Rebecca Lazarou, Mark Nesbitt, Andrew C. Scott, and Barbara Zipser. “A Systematic Methodology to Assess the Identity of Plants in Historical Texts: A Case Study Based on the Byzantine Pharmacy Text John the Physician’s Therapeutics.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 322 (2024): 117,622.

Leong, Elaine Yuen Tien, and Alisha Michelle Rankin. Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500-1800. History of Medicine in Context. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.