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Apothecary/ Medicine

Teacher note: A number of students contributed to these pages on Colonial times. Each contributed diffferent information or a different perspective. You may find that each article adds to your understanding and research base.

Go to Article 2.

Article 1

By: Amber C & Jessica G

The Craft

An apothecary is a person who prepares and sells drugs and other medicines like a pharmacist. This person also preforms procedures that are supposed to help cure people who have diseases and illnesses.
An apothecary would make medicines and that cure people. The medicines were made from herbs and plants.
The apothecaries didn't always make the medicines they performed some operations. For example when a person was drowning they would hang the person with a rope on a tree by their feet and then pull them up and down. Or they would put the person on a barrel and roll them on the barrel. Another example would be bloodletting; the apothecary would cut the patient thinking that it would rid the body of bad humors. But not all of the time they performed operations sometimes they would make medicines out of herbs and plants.

Tools of the Trade

some of the tools that they used were:
knife
herbs
tongue scraper
tooth extractor
adhesive plaster
bandages

Setting

1. The apothecary lives right on main street in their community. This house would be were everybody could get treated for their sickness and more near the town. It would be more in the town because that was were students could listen to medical lectures at collages. Doctors would sometimes go to people' homes in the countryside.

Required skills

The person would first of all have to stand the sight of blood and if you had this ability you would be known as a “doctor's boy”. They would also have to learn what herbs to mix and in general what to do when a sick person walked into the room.
The person would have to know math and science for their craft. In math they would have to know how to charge for their craft and count the money that they received. In science they would have to know the human body for surgery or something like that. They would have to know were to cut the skin in bloodletting and all of that.
The person received those skills from apprenticeship. It would take 3 to 6 years of that to become an apothecary and that would have to have had a collage degree. Some boys started medical careers at the age of 15. The teachers taught anatomy, osyeology, compounding of medicine, surgery, and the writings of Hippocrates. At the end of the apprenticeship the doctor's boy did bloodletting, tooth pulling, dressing wounds, and minor surgery.

In the Community

1. The society depended on the apothecary to cure people, help them, and save their lives.

This craft was definitely necessary to survive because if they didn't have it, people would die and the towns would be full of diseases.
This craft was useful to everybody because everybody got sick and if the lower class paid, they would be able to have access to medicine.
This craft was necessary to society because everybody would get sick and they would need care.

The growth of this trade in the colonies

In Jamestown they had not yet developed an apothecary so they had diseases and all kinds of sicknesses. But in England they had some medicines and cures but they had not been smart enough to bring on the ships with them. So when they had gotten to the Americas they had diseases. This craft had first been located somewhat in Jamestown (but not at first).

It came to the colonies later when they had imported some type of doctor.
Wood, rock, water, and many herbs were used to aid the apothecary's in their job.
As time went on they developed better medicines and cures as more people were getting sick and through their experience.
Men did all of the craft. Except that an experienced housewife also knew a lot about treating the sick and injured.
The doctor's aid could be a woman, like a nurse but the doctor was always a man.
Today
1. Today, doing this craft you'd be satisfied because you know that you were helping somebody and saving their lives.
2. This person might like this craft because they like curing people, as well as helping people. They might also like making medicine.
3. The job that would do this work today would be doctors. The industry that would do is medicine. Just like in old times they would prescribe medicines and cure people.
4. Today, we still do the same thing as they did in history, cure people, operate, and do procedures that help people.

Bibliography

C. Keith Wilbur, M.D., Revolutionary Medicine, 1980
Pages: 10-25
Susan Neilburg Terkel, Colonial American Medicine, 1993
Ruth Dean and Melissa Thomson, Life in the American Colonies, 1999 (Pages: 61-62)

Top of page

by Alyssa C., Ginny H., Susan W.

The apothecarist had to diagnose the patients and compound medications for that person. Medical treatment was expensive so sometimes people diagnosed themselves from domestic medical books. In that case the apothecarist supplied the ingredients for the patients to make thier own medication.
: A colonial apothecarist practiced kind of like a doctor. They made house calls to treat patients, made and prescribed medications and trained apprentices. Some also did surgury and midwifed. Some people learned apothecary by apprenticing, others learned at hospitals. You had to learn how to give patients the appropriate dosage of a drug, how to comound diffrent ingredients for diffrent ailments,etc. If you wanted to train for surgery or midwifing you would also have to learn the skills nessessary for for those callings.
: People needed this buiness because apothecarists gave medications for the relief of some common ailments and some could help deliver babies or operate on severly wounded or extremly sick patients. Someone might like this job because they like to make medications for people in dire need and they might like curing people of diseases or creating new and better medicines.