Pharmacy Museum, Pharmacy museum in Lviv, Ukraine

The Pharmacy Museum is an institution in Lviv that collects and displays old medicines and medical tools from several centuries. The collection includes bottles with recipes, surgical instruments, pharmacy furniture, and materials that show how medications were made and given to patients.

Military pharmacist Franz Wilhelm Natorp bought the corner house in 1774 and had a two-storey building with a pharmacy erected in 1775 by architect Piotr Polejowski. The pharmacy, later named "Under the Black Eagle", passed through several owners; in 1857 Antoni Sklepiński renovated it, and in 1875 a third floor was added. The pharmacy museum opened in 1966.

Each pharmacy had its own emblem hung at the entrance, and the shop took its name from it, as with "Under the Black Eagle". Pharmacists prepared extracts, tinctures, elixirs, ointments, cosmetics and medicinal wines for their clients, including the famous "Iron Wine", a saccharate of iron still sold in the trading hall.

The museum is located in central Lviv and easy to reach on foot. Visitors should allow enough time to look at the items carefully, as the details and craftsmanship of many pieces deserve close attention.

The forged iron sign above the entrance gives 1735 as the founding year, but historian Volodymyr Vuytsyk showed this is wrong: Franz Wilhelm Natorp arrived in Lviv with the Austrian annexation of Galicia in 1772, and the pharmacy building was erected in 1775. No 18th-century Lviv tax register records a pharmacy here.