Tom Reiss

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

American Author

Paracelsus

This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.

Swiss Scientist

An apothecary was once a key health professional, like today's pharmacists.

Historical Role

Apothecaries often appear in historical or fantasy literature and films.

Cultural Depictions

The term is not commonly used today except for effect or historical context.

Archaic Usage

In history, going to the apothecary was equivalent to visiting a pharmacy today.

Historical Location

In modern English, 'drugstore' or 'pharmacy' is preferred over 'apothecary'.

Archaic Term

The term may still appear in legal contexts or formal documents relating to pharmacies.

Legal Context

 particularly interested in European shipbuilding and in the carpentry and design that lay behind it in another letter to his brother King as these letters were invariably addressed he asked for two physicians to apothecaries and one surgeon to glean what he could from Western medicine though such assistance was promised at the

Africa’s rhyming history...

 to a country surgeon and apothecary in Sodbury, near Bristol, he heard a dairy maid say, "I shall never have smallpox, for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly, pockmarked face." Cowpox is a skin disease that resembles smallpox and infects cows. Later on, as a physician,

Apothecary