Western Frontier
On the eastern seaboard, many apothecaries had customers who were wealthy, and the shops reflected this in their rich architecture, beautiful bottles of various sizes, wall-to-wall shelving and drawers, and huge sunny windows that fronted the streets.
On the Western frontier, apothecaries (the buildings) came in all shapes and sizes. Some were little more than shacks.
One of the popular utensils they used was a pestle and mortar, for crushing and mixing substances. (The pestle is the pounding tool, the mortar is the bowl.) They were often made of stone, marble, or brass—hard enough to crush the medicine without crushing fine particles of the tools themselves. The tools had to be extremely washable, where residue from one medicine would not mix with another. Apothecaries sometimes ground uncooked white rice in them to clean them—repeating the procedure until the rice came out completely white.
Apothecaries also had very fine tools and trays where they made their own pills, before pills were manufactured by machine. As you can imagine, precise measurement was extremely important, and keeping each pill exactly the same size was an art form. Apothecaries had their own precise system of weighing mass in liquid and solid form.
Until about 1900, most medical recipes were written in Latin. Latin was the universal language, understood in Europe and America.
No comments:
Post a Comment