Medical ceramics : a catalogue of the English and Dutch collections in the Museum of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine / J.K. Crellin.

  • Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine
Date:
1969-
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medical ceramics : a catalogue of the English and Dutch collections in the Museum of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine / J.K. Crellin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ENGLISH TIN-GLAZED PHARMACY JARS The first documented landmark in the story of English tin-glazed ware is the 1567 petition of the two Antwerp potters, Jaspar Andries and Jacob Janson, requesting permission to make this ware in London. 11 It is interesting that in their petition they explicitly mentioned the manufacture of vessels for apothecaries. These early tin-glazed pharmaceutical containers were decorated with simple designs of bands of coloured criss-crosses, spots and lines, etc. (see pp. 1 1-16). The first elaborate design possibly came from Christian Wilhelm's Southwark pottery, opened in 1628. Tait attributes ajar with the bird on the rock motif to this pottery. 12 The familiar blue and white jars (blue painted decoration on a white ground), incorporating the name of the contents in the decoration, did not make their appearance until the 1650s (see p. 17). These jars were manufactured in large numbers during the next century or so, but it must not be forgotten that glass and other containers also had a prominent place in pharmaceutical practice. Unfortunately there is little documentary or pictorial evidence about the contents of the shops, though certainly by the late 18th to the early 19th century, as evidenced by English caricatures of the Gillray era, glass was very much in evidence. 13 However, generalisations must be made with caution for it has to be remembered that there was considerable diversity of establishments ranging from first-class pharmacies, such as the one connected with the London Society of Apothecaries (see fig. 77), to small unpretentious country stores, which are unlikely to have been so elegantly furnished. 14 In more than a hundred years of the production of blue and white jars (the eclipse of tin-glazed jars commenced with the rapid development of creamware in the 1760s, see p. 112) there were only three popular designs. These are: (1) the angel design (approximately 11 See for example Ray, A., English Dclftware Pottery in the Robert Hall Warren Collection Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, London, 1968, p. 3. Ray also mentions the Mailing jugs which are considered to be the earliest English tin-glazed ware (c. 1550). 12 Southwark (alias Lambeth) Delftware and the Potter, Christian Wilhelm, The Connoisseur, 1960, 146. 36-42; 1961, 147, 22-25, fig. 30. 13 G. M. Watson has also provided evidence of 18th-century use of glass: from a study of a 1756 inventory of a London pharmacy she has compiled a picture of the shop which is worth quoting in full. No pottery is mentioned. The shop was full of drugs. In the centre were the hundredweight sacks and casks of senna, gum arabic, peruvian bark, myrrh, Glauber's salts etc. Other dry goods were stored in fifty-three shop boxes, in the ten casks behind the counters, in 150 glass species glasses, some of which had brass caps, and in the nests of drawers under both windows. The liquids were kept on six front shelves and in 150 glass stoppered bottles in a large glass case. ( Some Eighteenth- Century Trading Accounts, in Poynter, F. N. L. [ed.], The Evolution of Pharmacy in Britain, London, 1965, p. 73.) Spiers, C. H., in Pharmaceutical and Medical Glass (a paper read to the Circle of Glass Collectors in April 1961) has further emphasised the early use of glass for pharmacy containers. Nests of drawers (see above quotation from Watson) were widely used for preparations, and some with 18th-century labels have recently been found in Winchester. ( Chem. & Drugg., 1966, 185. 161.) 14 Unfortunately there are very few pre-1800 didactic illustrations of the interior of English apothecary shops. However, some impression can be gained from Wm. Faithorne's The Apothecary's Shop Opened (1651) and Lab oratory with Pharmacy in Rear (1747), both reproduced in L. G. Matthews' History of Pharmacy in Britain, Edinburgh and London, 1962. The storage drawers referred to in footnote 13 are well illustrated in Plate 3 of Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode (1745) which depicts Dr. Misaubin's consulting room. This is reproduced in H. Phillips' Mid-Georgian London, London, 1964, fig. 132. Phillips' book provides a valuable pictorial survey of mid-18th-century London. The shortage of illustrations makes it difficult to appreciate the impact that rows of elegant pharmacy jars made on customers, but an attempt is made in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum through reconstructions of five historical pharmacies of which two are English. There is no Dutch example but see the well illustrated article by D. A. Wittop Koning, The Amsterdam Historical Medical-Pharmaceutical Museum, Endeavour, 1954, 13, 128-133.