Pottery in the service of medicine.(Books about antiques)('English Delftware Drug Jars: The Collection of the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain')(Book review)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people suffering from ailments of all sorts sought relief with various elixirs prepared and sold by royal, monastic, or commercial apothecaries. While medicine was an extremely rudimentary affair, then, as today, many pills, ointments, syrups, oils, and other concoctions were created from plant materials, particularly herbs. As early as 1704, one Robert Pitt complained about the proliferation of apothecaries, writing that "the shops of Medicines are increas'd to fill the Town, when you have eight or ten in some streets, three or four in every one, and no Alley or Passage without the Painted Pot." The "Painted Pot" refers to the tin-glazed earthenware ceramic vessels that, in England, starting in the 1570s, were sold from potteries to apothecaries for the storage of their potions. The pottery jars were always inscribed in Latin with the name of their contents and sometimes the date the jar was produced. These beautiful pieces, particularly those that bear a date, are widely sought by collectors.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

We knew from Louis L. Lipski's seminal work Dated English Delftware: Tin-glazed Earthenware 1600-1800 (1984) that some seventeen hundred authentic drug jars survive from this two-hundred-year period. Among these are the 172 tin-glazed earthenware examples (40 of them dated) in the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in London, which are catalogued in English Delftware Drug Jars: The Collection of the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, a new publication edited by Briony Hudson that adds much information to the record.

The Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society was founded in 1842, one year after the society itself, and was intended to aid students enrolled in the School of Pharmacy. Its second curator, Edward Morrell Holmes, who was appointed in 1872 and served for fifty years, immediately set about forming a collection of objects affiliated with the profession of the apothecary. By the time of his retirement, it included more than twenty thousand objects, many acquired through bequests and gifts as well as through the purchase of individual objects and entire collections.

Drug jars were made in different shapes depending on what type of ingredient they were to hold. Generally, jars for storing liquids had a spout and were raised on a foot, while those for dry ingredients were cylindrical. Both types had short everted necks that were ...