Musik und Pharmazie: Apotheker und Arzneimittel in der Oper, and: La pharmacie vaudoise au temps de la preponderance radicale, 1845-1925 (review)

These two volumes, published as part of the Veröffentlichungen der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Pharmazie (Publications de la Société suisse d'histoire de la pharmacie), were accepted by the faculty of the History of Science and the medical faculty of the University of Bern as doctoral theses. Both authors worked under Professor François Ledermann, and they reflect the reach of his students. Doris Zaugg has cataloged at length the theme of apothecaries and medicinals in European opera—a not unreasonable undertaking, in view of the pervasiveness of potions, poisons, and other medicinal substances in the operatic oeuvres of the last three centuries and a half. The time frame is in fact more inclusive, since romantic and classical opera drew heavily on themes and tropes from the early Middle Ages onward. An additional theme is the continuous professional discord between physicians and pharmacists in highly regulated and hierarchical societies. While Zaugg does not undertake to test the variously described effectiveness of potions and poisons, this book is of interest to those wishing to examine the reflections of medicine and pharmacy in the artistic imagination of composers, who in turn reflected the tastes of their public.

La pharmacie vaudoise is more strictly tailored to the interests of the profession and covers the history of pharmaceutical regulation, production, and professional education, emphasizing the period of bourgeois emancipation in the Swiss Republic between 1845 and 1945. The periodization is clearly oriented to local and regional developments in a canton of la Suisse romande, centering on the city of Lausanne but governed until 1798 from the German-speaking canton of Bern. The canton of Vaud seems to have been at the margin of developments throughout, and it is this relative isolation and lack of regulation that makes this very lengthy and detailed account of more than passing interest. The author divides the large historical introduction into an early period under the counts of Savoy, governance from Bern, and entry into the new Swiss republic and the beginning of the regulation of medicinal substances and their commerce from 1810 to 1845. Separate sections deal with the inspection of pharmacies, distinctions and turf wars between pharmacists and druggists, pharmaceutical education, and professional organization during the main period of interest. A good hundred pages of appendices, a bibliography, and an index of substance names and persons round out a hefty volume that will be a useful reference for students of European pharmacy.