Musée de la pharmacie Albert-Ciurana, University pharmacy museum at Faculty of Pharmacy, Montpellier, France.
The Albert-Ciurana Pharmacy Museum is a collection at Montpellier University that displays objects from various periods of pharmacy history, including furniture, paintings, medicine containers, and historic herbarium specimens. The exhibits document the material culture of pharmaceutical practice across several centuries.
A pharmacist named Albert Ciurana founded the museum in 1972 as a place to preserve knowledge about the long tradition of pharmaceutical education in Montpellier. This tradition goes back to the 13th century and made the city an important center for medical and pharmaceutical studies.
The rooms display recreated pharmacies from the 19th and 20th centuries with period equipment, containers, and tools that pharmacists actually used. Visitors can see how these workplaces were organized and what materials went into preparing medicines.
The museum is open on specific days only with limited hours, so check beforehand when it is accessible. The place is small and intimate, allowing visitors to see the entire collection and examine all items carefully in roughly one hour.
The collection features unusual items like tortoise shells, snake skins, buffalo horns, and ancient distilling tools that were used in making medicines. These objects reveal how early pharmacists sourced their materials from the natural world and how inventive they were in creating remedies.
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