Victorian Pharmacy (2010) s01e01 Episode Script
Part 1
Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire revives the sights, sounds and smells of the 19th century.
Morning.
Morning.
At its heart stands the pharmacy, a treasure house of potions and remedies from a century and a half ago.
Now, in a unique experiment, Ruth Goodman, Nick Barber and Tom Quick are opening the doors to the Victorian pharmacy, recreating a high-street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea.
How can I help? They'll bring the pharmacy to life, sourcing ingredients, mixing potions and dispensing cures.
But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic and cold cures were made from opium, the team will need to be highly selective.
They'll only make safe versions of traditional remedies and try them out on carefully selected customers.
The start was like the Wild West.
People didn't know what was good and bad.
Try and get a bit of speed up Oh, there we go.
The pharmacy was something that affected everybody's lives in one way or another.
They'll discover an age of social transformation that brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time, heralding a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern high-street chemist as we know it today.
The Victorian pharmacy opens its doors in 1837, the year when the teenage Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
Wow, look at this place! This is fantastic.
Ooh, that smell! It's much bigger than I thought it would be.
There's a heck of a lot of stuff here, isn't there? There's a tremendous amount of stuff.
Fresh from her time on the Victorian farm, Ruth Goodman will now be applying her skills in new areas, from medicines to cosmetics.
As a domestic historian, she knows just how important the pharmacy was to ordinary people.
Doctors were expensive.
Really, on a day-to-day basis, only the rich were using doctors.
Occasionally a poor person might be able to save up for a consultation, maybe a doctor might offer some free consultation, but in general most people in the 19th century turned to the pharmacist for the majority of their healthcare.
Oh! It's a beautiful place to be in, we're going to be able to make this work really well.
Nick Barber is professor of the practice of pharmacy at the University of London's School of Pharmacy.
Parrot Brand polishing soap and Monkey Brand.
Things like Sloan's Liniment, which people use nowadays, and Zam-Buk.
As the pharmacist, he will be responsible for recommending and preparing all the remedies and medicines that his shop dispenses.
It's a unique opportunity for Nick to learn how his profession evolved.
It's a fantastic chance to recreate what it was like to be a Victorian pharmacist at a time when pharmacy was completely different to how it is today.
Pharmacists were creating new things, lots of innovation happening then, the growth of chemistry and pharmacists were experimenting and developing new sorts of treatments as well.
We're going to have fun with this! I'm going to see how this sign's getting on.
OK, see you.
There's old pill-rolling devices here.
Look at these liquids up here, this is a tincture of zingib.
No Victorian pharmacy would be complete without an apprentice.
And these are all the Latin names I'm going to have to know about.
That job falls to Tom Quick.
A PhD student in the history of medicine, he's hoping to put theory into practice.
The natural products were all in their Latin names.
And so much equipment as well, right? It's remarkable, isn't it? Really, what I think of as history isn't about just seeing things behind glass cases.
It's about people's lives and what people did on a day-to-day basis.
We've got all the kit here, which was all needed in those days.
We've got, erm We've the balance there, right? Yeah, you'd be weighing things out carefully.
You know, careful being the key word, because you killed people if you got these things wrong.
Some of these things I was taught when I was an undergraduate, but I've never used them professionally.
So actually to do these sorts of things, to go back to mixing, to pounding, to compounding things is an enormous challenge.
The front of shop is where they will come face to face with the public.
In the early Victorian age, new ideas on how to treat illness were beginning to filter through to the high street, but in this moment of change from traditional to scientific medicine, many of the cures the pharmacy will sell are based on old beliefs and remedies.
Poison of lance headed viper.
Oh, my giddy.
In 1837, despite the dangerous products on the shelves, anyone could trade as a pharmacist.
Even grocers were setting up as chemists.
Hee-hee, look at that! Wow! That looks so good.
It's just fantastic to see your name above a shop like that.
Yeah You'd want a good standing within the community to be a pharmacist.
It was a hub of the town, really, and people used to come here Everybody's ill, everybody comes to the pharmacy.
Opening a new shop was a massive investment, and pharmacists needed to be entrepreneurs to survive.
Marketing was everything.
Like many of their predecessors, the new Barber & Goodman pharmacy is having a grand opening.
BAND PLAYS: "Blaze Away" In order to understand how people responded to 19th century remedies, Barber & Goodman will dispense authentic but safe Victorian medicines to carefully chosen volunteers.
The pharmacy's first customer is Sue Dodd, who has worked as a nurse for 35 years.
Hello, Mr Barber.
I have a very bad cough, is there anything that you can help? Well, have you tried modern cures for a cold? Do you think they work? Some do, although you can't beat natural local honey and lemon for sore throats.
Generally things like that.
Well, in Victorian times what we'd have given you is Dr John Collis Browne's Chlorodyne.
I've got the Chlorodyne here.
It was invented when he was an Indian army doctor for cholera.
It didn't treat cholera, but it became a very popular treatment for coughs, colds, chests and things like this.
It's got in chloroform, it's got, eropium in it and it's got cannabis in it.
Why would they put those things in? Well, it makes people feel better, as you might imagine.
Many pharmacists made up their own versions of Chlorodyne, but the high opiate content made these medicines addictive, and death from overdose was a real risk.
Collis Browne's mixture is still on sale today, but with a low, non-addictive dose of morphine.
Opium suppresses cough, so if people do have troublesome coughs, then it would help bring that down.
We'll knock out something for you which is a bit safer.
And will it have the opium and things like that in? No, we'll find one without those sorts of things.
Oh, good! Just natural herbs we'll use for this one.
That sounds wonderful.
Before his customer returns for her authentic Victorian cough medicine, Nick will need to find a less risky recipe.
Horehound and aniseed.
Try that, see what that looks like.
Balsam of horehound and aniseed.
That's it, so what have we got in? Paregoric elixir The chemist's bible was the Pharmacopoeia, which listed all the remedies and potions of the day.
The one we can't use, definitely, is paregoric, and paregoric is camphorated opium, it's a form of opium, so again we've got the morphine in.
So we need to take that balsam of horehound and aniseed and try and reformulate it using current knowledge and using things which are a bit safer than some of the ingredients.
My goodness, it's gorgeous at this time of year.
Isn't it? Nick's chosen remedy, balsam of horehound, was made up largely of natural herbs and flowers.
Cleavers, this is what we're after, yeah? Perfect, exactly.
The job of sourcing the essential ingredients falls to Ruth and herbalist Eleanor Gallia.
Eleanor is an expert in plant medicine.
A Victorian pharmacist would have needed her knowledge of the natural world.
So why do we want cleavers in a cough medicine, then? They're the most wonderful immune stimulant, and they're very cleansing for the body.
With respiratory catarrh conditions, the first thing you need to do is encourage the phlegm away from the chest, so the body is very good at cleansing itself and draining itself.
A pharmacy needed to maintain a healthy stock of medicinal plants.
So do we need anything else, as well as the cleavers, while we're out.
Plantain.
Oh, that's quite a common thing.
The surrounding countryside was a valuable and free resource.
They like to be stood on, planted into the ground.
While Ruth is gathering the ingredients for the cough medicine, at the back of the shop, Nick and Tom open up the pharmacy's laboratory.
Wow! Look at this place.
This is going to be amazing, isn't it? The nerve centre of their business, this is where the pharmacist would experiment with new cures and manufacture drugs and potions.
It's halfway between an alchemist's cave and a kitchen and a storeroom and all sorts, really.
Yeah, this is a really interesting space for me.
This is the place that probably changed the most dramatically over the time period we're looking at, 1840s - '50s.
This is kind of like a kitchen, right? You've got all these ingredients over here, these sort of herbal things.
And you'd be here at the bench, making your latest concoction to sell in the shop.
Yes, to sell to the lucky public out there.
But by the end of the century, this is kind of more a place of chemical experimentation.
We've even got a hammer for pounding the herbs.
What I hope to learn is some of the techniques which Victorian pharmacists used to use, the manual skills which some of us have forgotten.
I also hope to learn some of the different sorts of approaches which they had to medicine in those days.
The industrial revolution was at its height and half the population of Britain lived in towns.
Overcrowding, poor sanitation and grinding poverty left many people vulnerable to disease.
Hundreds of thousands died in the crowded, sewage-ridden cities.
But Victorians had only the haziest of ideas about what caused illness or how to treat it.
And so they often fell back on traditional remedies as Nick is about to discover as he prepares a bruise medicine made from earthworms.
Well, I didn't think I'd be doing this when I was doing a Victorian remedy - digging, rather bizarrely, for earthworms.
Earthworms were part of an old remedy which was around before Victorian times, from medieval times, really, in which people would take the earthworm and they would boil up earthworms with olive oil and some form of wine into oil of earthworms, which they put on bruises.
Here's one.
Another one to add to my haul.
There must be easier ways to treat bruises than this.
Customers would often ask a pharmacist to make up favourite traditional remedies like this.
You can always say, if people believe in things, then things do work.
The power of belief on health is very great.
Oil of Earthworm - who would have thought that was a Victorian recipe? It's obviously something that has come from long before, an old idea, one of those things that has hung on into the early part of the Victorian medical experience.
In the proper recipe we use real earthworms and boil them in oil.
But, in the interest of worm welfare, we're not going to do that.
We're going to use these dried worms, exactly the same species, which we've obtained.
In the pharmacy at this time, you took things which were whole and you had to break them up by physical force.
I've always been fond of earthworms.
Charles Darwin spent a lot of his life studying them.
And I think he'd be upset by this.
I don't think the worms would have been any use at all in their bruise.
I think probably it just came from the old days when people saw things that looked similar and related them.
So, for example, the skin of an earthworm, when you take it out of the soil, does look a bit like a bruise.
They didn't understand what a bruise was as we do now, of course.
In those days, there wasn't much science around, so if things looked similar, that was probably good enough for most people.
We can add some red wine.
It seems rather a waste, but That's now ready to heat up.
I've got the stove lit over here.
I'll put it on there.
I'll bring them over here to cool and take these lucky ones back to the garden.
There's a strong placebo effect with all sorts of treatments.
Even in modern days, we can get 20 to 30% effect size from a placebo treatment.
We know that, if the doctor is very positive about it and says it will work, it is more effective than not.
That's a nasty bruise, how did you get that? Playing around with a tennis ball.
James Scott is a pharmacy student.
common throughout history and there have been lots of remedies for it.
We're going to try the oil of earthworm.
How literally? Literally earthworm, Mixed with olive oil and some red wine.
We're just going to put that on the top.
Now, we're going to leave that.
I think tomorrow you should try applying this again, probably morning and evening, and then we'll see how you do in a few days' time.
Come back then.
OK, thank you very much.
Bye.
Pharmacist's apprentice, Tom, is hard at work setting up the carboys.
So that's the iron oxide, I believe.
I'm going to try and make a lovely purple colour so that we can The idea would be to attract as many people in by demonstrating your pharmaceutical skill in some way, basically.
I think we'll just see what happens for the moment.
At a time when many customers couldn't read, these tall, colourful storage bottles were a clear sign that this was a chemist's shop.
So, very red.
This is a washing soda.
Mix them together.
The mixture's slightly purple.
We're just going to have to see what happens.
Learning how to mix the chemicals precisely enough to produce a successful colour was a fundamental test of a young apprentice's skill.
Half purple, half red now.
You don't want to mess up this.
How can you trust a chemist who can't even make the colours that enable you to recognise them as a druggist, you know? I don't know what to do here.
Yeah, it's not really working that well, is it? Am I looking at the right thing? Yes.
Plantago lanceolota, that's the lanceolate plantain.
Ruth and Eleanor have found another wild plant, the common plantain, for Nick's cough cure.
So what's good about this for a cough medicine? It's used in all sorts of allergies and irritations in the lungs.
Once the lungs are irritated, then they become inflamed and then they produced more mucus.
So, plantain soothes and tones the mucous membrane.
The mucosa is incredibly important because it's where the oxygen that you breathe in dissolves from gaseous form into a liquid form.
And you can actually take it in a tea, you can use it in hay fever when you have that problem, the allergy problem.
So it's a very useful plant to befriend.
So what about the more exotic ingredients, those things from foreign parts? You'd buy those in, maybe from London.
So I suppose they are being gathered by herbalists in other parts of the world, for sale.
Herbalists and collectors.
And they still are.
It's really interesting, how, at the beginning of the 19th century, there's this sort of body of herbal knowledge.
I mean, people like John Boot And his son, Jesse.
.
And his son, Jesse, exactly.
Boots the Chemists, the founders, they begin as a little medical herbalist shop, selling botanicals in one form or another, inspired by all sorts of different people.
Jesse himself, Jesse Boot, John's son, was very interesting.
He studied pharmacy in his spare time, and then they employed a chemist.
And the herbalist business was no longer making money.
Moving into.
And the druggists were so big at the time, and they were very much about making money.
And so it was in their interest not to be.
encouraging too much.
Well, not to be encouraging people to be using their own medicines and growing them.
The word 'drug' derives from the Dutch 'droog' for dried plant.
Today, there are more than 7,000 medical compounds derived from plants.
Tom is edging closer to a near-perfect colour.
It looks an all right colour now.
All we need to do, really, is dilute it so, hopefully, a little bit of light comes through it.
It's very thick.
So I'm just going to go for it and pour this straight in, try not to make too much of a mess, and see what happens.
Having achieved a reasonable purple, Tom moves onto the yellow carboy.
One explanation for the fixed colours of the carboys reveals an ancient theory that still influenced early Victorian medicine Yeah, that's about right, I think.
.
.
that each of the colours represented one of the four elements Job done.
.
.
or humours, that made up the body.
The four humours were black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile.
And those really equated to things which could be seen coming out of the body, to put it basically.
And this was how they understood the body.
The body had too much of things inside it, and therefore things would come out when it had too much of that humour.
So it could be kept in balance.
Belief in the four humours persisted well into the 19th century and an excess of blood in particular was thought to be the cause of many illnesses.
Bloodletting was big business and a jar of healthy, voracious leeches was a real money-spinner for the Victorian pharmacist.
Horrible looking things, aren't they? Carl Peters-Bond runs a leech farm in South Wales.
What did they use them for in Victorian times? Basically, where they used to cut people to remove blood, which is obviously very painful, the leech can bite.
It sort of cuts a little Y-shaped hole.
A leech this size would probably take about 8ml, and you'd probably lose about 50 afterwards.
It's almost a luxury because it's painless, fairly painless.
And were they luxury items or were they everyday items? They would probably have been a very expensive item.
I would consider them a luxury.
Go on then, let's see what they're like.
Well, it feels a bit like a slug.
It feels very leech-ish.
So these would be picked out and they would be put on to a patient Whoops! Not too keen on getting stabbed by that end, I must admit.
I'm a bit nervous about it, I have to say.
Carl's partner, Christopher Peters-Bond, has bravely volunteered to befriend the leech.
Quite a bit smaller than the other leeches.
These have been starved for almost two years, so their gut is completely empty of blood.
You just lay them on the skin? Yep.
Oh, it's really arched its head, hasn't it?.
Yes.
That very different to when they were just holding on my skin.
It's just tasting about.
Yeah, there he goes.
He's sort of having a bit of a nibble.
I can feel like a little bee sting.
But apart from that, no, it's next to nothing at all.
That's what they've evolved over millions of years to do.
Bite painlessly and remove the blood.
It's a natural pharmaceutical tool, really.
This is a really medieval sight, isn't it? We've got 2,000 years of history here.
This great long Western European tradition of bloodletting.
But that's very human of us, isn't it, the hanging on to tradition? "My mother did it, my grandmother did it, my great-grandmother did it.
"Of course it's good for you!" Here's one of its sisters that have.
What a contrast! One hungry leech, one leech three-quarters of the way through his dinner.
It's like me and my pudding stomach.
However full my dinner stomach is, there's always room for pudding.
The leech injects an anti-coagulant when it bites and the wound can bleed for up to 10 hours after the leech has dropped off.
Even modern first aid can do very little to stop the bleeding.
It will just keep on going.
It's about 50ml.
It shows how potent the chemicals are in its saliva to really produced that effect for such a long period of time.
How do you feel after it? I feel fine, to be honest with you.
I don't really feel any different to before.
A pleasant experience, do you think? It's certainly not as unpleasant as it looks, perhaps.
It's All a bit more straight forward.
Yes.
I'm surprised that there's no pain at all or anything like that.
I can completely understand how someone might sit through several of these, thinking that they were doing themselves some good.
Yeah, it certainly beats all the other bloodletting methods, doesn't it? It's so much better than being cut with knives or.
I don't think I would have volunteered for having a knife cut into me.
I hope you still feel as positive in 10 hours' time when you've changed the bandages six times! After use, the leech goes back in the jar and the bloody bandages are dried out, ready to use again.
It wasn't until the mid-19th century that Victorians understood the dangers of cross-infection, so disease spread easily.
Right, next job.
But while leeches remained popular, the ever-inventive Victorians came up with man-made alternatives for drawing blood, including the scarifier.
They'd press this button here and the blades would shoot across.
Oh, it would be horrible.
And then I suppose, once you've got it in, you've got to draw the blood out, haven't you? Absolutely.
It would just clot otherwise, quite quickly.
So if you want to be losing blood, which is the idea, then you need something to draw it out.
And they've got this beautiful bit of really Victorian kit here, which is a vacuum pump.
It's like a bicycle pump in reverse.
They knew how to make equipment, didn't they, in those days? It's just so Victorian-looking, isn't it? Beautifully engineered and turned.
Once a cut had been made in the skin, the vacuum inside the glass cup drew the blood out.
The air out, and then straight on.
That's it.
I can see it coming up.
Wow! Look at that!.
That's rising.
.
Yeah! You can see a bit of redness to it as well.
.
It's bringing the blood up to the surface, probably breaking little capillaries.
The blood would be welling up out of there as well, wouldn't it?.
Yeah, I mean, if you made all those little cuts, that would be quite a different thing.
Drawing out evil vapours that had somehow been clogging things up.
I could live with that.
I'm not sure I could live with that.
Yes.
All the ingredients for the balsam of horehound cough medicine have been brought to the lab, where herbalist Eleanor joins Nick.
This is horehound, is it?.
Yes.
.
Where does horehound live? Is it a big plant or a little plant? It's a shrub.
It's a kind of bluey green shrub.
She's soaked the herbs in alcohol.
In your original recipe, you had syrup of squill.
Yes.
Now I'm sure you're familiar with squill.
Yes, yes.
Can be rather toxic, but very old medicine.
We've actually got squill and we've got it in an oxymel.
What is an oxymel? An oxymel is honey and vinegar.
A member of the lily family, squill has been used for centuries to loosen mucus from the lungs.
So another tincture that we've got is cleavers, which is a really common herb, as Ruth and I discovered.
Plantain, this is an interesting one.
Again, a very common herb.
And then the final herb we've got is the elecampane, a huge, tall, yellow, golden flower, a bit like a sunflower but with enormous leaves.
So that is our preparation ready to go.
A couple of teaspoons of treacle.
Hence "the spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
" Absolutely.
Slow job of stirring this in.
The more patience that you can work with, like cooking, the better.
So this is the oxymel of squill.
You can keep stirring as we put it in.
The squill's been going for a long time, hasn't it? I think it was in the Ebers Papyrus, which is the oldest recorded formulary, if you like, which was 1500 BC in Egyptian times, something like that.
And apparently it was considered so effective that it was an object of temple worship.
Really? Yep.
So that's lovely.
Ready to bottle it now? Yes.
Early pharmacists put art and skill into the medicines they created.
Thank you, Doctor.
Thank you very much.
But in order to make a profit it was essential that the customer was satisfied, and that word got out to the local community that here was a medicine that could be trusted.
It smells fantastic, I have to say.
Have a smell.
It smells quite nice.
It's half a teaspoon, three times a day in a glass of water.
See how it is.
It's very, very strong.
Mm.
Oh, yes.
HE LAUGHS It's clearing something.
Here's the bottle.
We'd like you to give that a try.
Come back in a few days and we'll see how you feel.
I'll let you know.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Victorian cities and other industrial centres were notorious for thick smogs or "pea-soupers".
This noxious mix of smoke and sulphur dioxide, thrown up by the burning of coal, made breathing-related illnesses a scourge of the age.
Ruth is preparing another type of cough treatment.
Oh, that's heavy! I have a volunteer coming in, who says he's willing to try out a plaster.
This isn't quite the same as modern plaster! This is a medical treatment, something you put on the skin to draw things out of the body.
It can be all sorts of things, like there are plasters that fit on the head to help draw away, working for headaches.
There are plasters that help to sort of, like earache, you could put plasters around the back of the ears that will help to draw humours out.
All sorts of conditions were believed to be able to be relieved in this way.
Of all the sort of early Victorian forms of medicine, in some ways this is one of the least invasive, one of the most gentle methods because you're not breaking the skin or anything, you're just applying it on the surface of the skin.
Certainly that warmth and the vapours that rise off it, even if they do nothing else, can be really soothing.
I've got to melt this wax down, which is going to take a little while, and then I add the olive oil.
Plasters were a common preparation for many conditions throughout the 19th century.
These sticky leather strips could be infused with different active ingredients and were used to treat a variety of ailments.
This is the most active ingredient.
This is an oil of Frankincense.
It smells wonderful.
I just want a couple of drops of this.
Some ailments were treated with more dangerous ingredients - the poisonous belladonna plant to relieve muscle spasms, lead for cuts, and opium for local pain relief.
Gosh, as that goes into the warm oil, boy, can I smell that! Frankincense is one of those valuable spices well, it's not a spice, it's a resin from a tree, but it's one of those really important ones in the history of medicine.
It's particularly good at sort of clearing things out from the chest.
That's why it's an important ingredient for this plaster.
Next door in the treatment room, Tom is using a favourite Victorian implement, the bronchial kettle, to try and relief the symptoms of customer Keith Dodd's dry, wheezy cough.
What we've got to try and help you with that today is a thing called a bronchial kettle.
Looks very interesting.
The idea of this is it's going to create a lot of steam and so on, and it's got some herbs in there, and what we're going to do is get you, if you want to come around here and I can sit you in this little booth that we've made in the back here.
With added herbs and Tom's self-made tent, the bronchial kettle is an industrial step up from placing the customer's head under a towel over a bowl of steaming water.
We'll try and create a kind of steamy environment.
Hopefully what will happen is we'll get a kind of nice thick steam coming up, and you mentioned the cough was dry It's a very dry cough, yeah.
And so what the idea behind it would have been would be to counteract the dryness of the cough in some way by creating a very wet environment for you.
Now this is the scary bit.
Ruth now has to cut out a template for her cough plaster.
"Place the leather on a thick "and smooth it before putting on the shape.
" Now I've got to cut a paper stencil.
A decent bit of card.
That's sort of the shape I want .
.
ish.
Oh, I like making things.
And to make it stay in place, I'm to wet it.
I obviously don't need very much at all.
OK.
So all I've got to do now is cut around, and then I could pack these in boxes.
You put a bit of wax-proof paper between each one and you can stack them up in boxes so you could sell a box of cough plasters, a box of headache plasters.
Although it's a very old idea and sort of a very old technique, the whole way of packaging it and selling it is actually really new.
There we go.
That's me first chest plaster.
I do have a bit of a cough, yes.
You do? And what sort of a cough is it? A bronchial sort of cough.
A bit asthmatic.
Retired army medic Anthony Dunford has come in to try the plaster.
What I'm hoping is that as the wax melts it will release the active ingredient, which is Frankincense.
Frankincense.
So you're going to get that sort of pungent smell rising up under your nose.
You'll be breathing it in.
It's pointy end down.
So that just goes on the centre there.
We just smooth that.
I can feel the warmth of your body is melting that wax.
It's more pliable than when I put it on.
That seems to be sticking.
Oh, it is, isn't it?! Hey, the self-adhesive plaster! SHE LAUGHS Perhaps I don't need my bandages after all.
The Victorians obviously would have worn it as long as possible, two or three days, so it is really a matter of how much you can put up with before you need to get it off and have a wash.
I will persevere.
Are you getting any benefit from that there? Yes, it's definitely helping.
I can actually breathe really deeply now, which I couldn't have done 10 minutes ago, so it's really helped.
I'm certainly breathing more easily at the moment.
As you seem to be enjoying it so much, then, I'll leave you there for a while.
OK, don't forget me.
OK, see you in a bit.
The bronchial kettle was one way of clearing the airwaves, but another popular method was spitting.
If a shop wanted to keep the phlegm off the floor, it was in their interests to provide a spittoon.
What we've got here is a spittoon for of phlegm.
Would have been of the worst duties in the shop, to have to empty this thing, basically.
Cleaning them out was a serious health hazard as the spittoon could easily be contaminated with tuberculosis, a common disease in Victorian times.
The way we think about medicines today and disease today, this idea of lots of different people spitting into the same bowl, it seems bizarre.
But actually, if you think about certainly early 19th century ideas of disease, it's not so weird because the idea is that really, disease is like a visible thing.
This is before bacteriology, remember, so there's no idea of a hidden substance there that's going to give you a disease.
So although there might be a big sort of, the way we might think of it as a huge amount of tuberculosis and all sorts of things festering in this swamp, really, actually, as far as they were concerned, as long as you get rid of the mucus itself, no problem.
Few things worried Victorians more than their bowel movements.
The pharmacist was able to offer a very special treatment to keep them regular.
Victorians believed there was nothing like a good purge to make them feel better.
It was what you needed to do, clear yourself out.
This is something called the everlasting pill.
It's one of my favourite remedies from the Victorian age.
Particularly at this time, people wanted to purge the body, and this was one of the ways of doing it.
What they used was a pill a bit like this, which was made out of something called antimony.
Antimony is a really heavy metal.
It's quite a toxic metal, which we wouldn't use these days, but in those days they didn't see it as that.
They'd take this, it would go into their gut, a little bit of the antimony would be dissolved, they'd have vomiting, they'd have diarrhoea, and the pill would pass through.
It's called the everlasting pill because it's fished out of the faeces at the end, washed up, put in a bottle on the shelf, and any member of the family who wants a good purge takes it the next time they want to take it.
Potentially it's passed on through the generations.
Some doctors began to question the wisdom of using such dangerous techniques.
The search for alternative, less risky treatments was on.
Malvern Spa in Worcestershire offered an alternative therapy - the revolutionary new hydrotherapy cure.
Hello, John.
Nice to meet you.
I'm in such trepidation about this.
Don't worry, it's only cold water.
Remember, it's five or six in the morning and I need your help to wet the sheets.
OK.
Dr John Harcup has brought the water cure to Blists Hill.
Have you done this yourself? Not wrapped in a white sheet, but I had a cold bath on many occasions.
By cold do you mean? Oh, yes.
Very cold.
We did some research work in the 1990s about this.
It was amazing.
I had my blood test before and after a cold bath, and my white cell count went up dramatically.
So this is actually .
.
stimulating the immune system.
And it really is.
I mean, did they know that in the Victorian period? No, they hadn't a clue.
So why were they doing it, then? What's this supposed to do for me? This is supposed to relax you.
To relax? Yes.
Wet sheets?! SHE LAUGHS I don't call that very relaxing! Well, this is the effect of water, you see.
Your heart works more efficiently and harder, and you get a better circulation in other parts of the body.
It was so different from bleeding and purging, and these heavy-metal poisons.
So this is a cure for the same sorts of things that all those really invasive techniques were being used for? That's right.
Of course, non-invasive, really.
The Malvern Water Cure was first offered in 1842 by two local doctors who were appalled by the dangers of the drugs and techniques in common use.
You'll warm it up very quickly.
Oh Honestly.
I wish it did hurry up and warm up! You're impatient.
You're an impatient patient.
God, I am.
I hate being cold! You're going to feel better because you've been relaxed and you've been stimulated by the cold water.
Strange though it is, I would rather do this than swallow a dose of arsenic, mercurywhatever.
Lead.
Lead.
Exactly.
So you could either go to your physician and have something really poisonous prescribed Yes, or you could come to Malvern and Have the health regime.
That's right.
One day sort me out? No, no, no.
You came for three weeks, at least.
Oh, right.
So you've got all the accommodation costs, yeah.
It was four guineas a week.
That's a lot of money! It's £400.
There were quite a number of famous names on the patient list.
Yes.
Charles Darwin came and he ended up by saying he didn't think the Water Cure was quackery.
Right.
And Florence Nightingale came when she collapsed after working too hard doing the report for the Royal Sanitary Commission.
Oh, right.
And she wrote, seven years afterwards, that she owed her life to the Water Cure at Malvern.
Really? Yes.
So how long do I have to stay at this? An hour.
Right.
Great.
And then I'll come and unwrap you.
OK I expect you'll be asleep, actually.
OK.
Cheerio.
Bye.
I don't like having my feet all tied up.
I always pull the bedclothes out of the bottom of the bed when I go to bed.
The Malvern Water Cure was far more than just being wrapped in wet sheets.
Plenty of hill-walking and the drinking of endless glasses of spa water were all part of the regime.
Taking the waters was hugely fashionable, and manufacturers began producing drinks that mimicked the taste and fizziness of spring water.
These quickly established themselves as popular health drinks.
Scientist, Mike Bullivant, will be running the pharmacy laboratory.
His working knowledge of 19th-century chemistry will be invaluable.
Aerated gassed waters were a really big part of the sales for pharmacists.
They made lots of money on it.
Oh, hopefully.
The basic ingredients are cheap enough, aren't they? So how do you make gaseous water? Three ingredients.
First is water, obviously.
Good start.
We've got citric acid.
Right.
Which is an ingredient in today's waters.
Oh, right.
It's perfectly harmless.
Second Or third ingredient, sodium bicarbonate, baking soda.
Another harmless compound.
I can see then gassing together there, the gas being produced.
The carbon dioxide forming.
So there's your aerated water.
And the acid test is, does it pop when you open it? OK, give it a go.
CORK POPS Whoa! Result.
That's a fairly tight seal on there.
Nice design, there.
This is a good bottle, as well, isn't it? One of the big problems in the early days was that producing this water produced pressure, and the bottles weren't strong enough.
And in the early days the pharmacists used to have thick woollen jumpers on.
They were told to wear them to protect them from the broken glass if the bottle exploded.
They tried various other bottles.
I've got a couple that they tried.
This was a bottle which they produced because one of the problems was if you produced a normal bottle, put a cork in it, as you did, as the cork dried out, it shrank, pops out.
And therefore, they produced this bottle which has a round base, so it can't stand and let the cork dry out.
It's put down, it rests on its side, so the cork was kept permanently wet.
Right, here we are, shallow bath.
And this will prepare you for going up the hills.
It's to tone you up.
Tone me up.
Argh! Blimey! Ohh Now, there is other things we can do with the water.
We can give you a douche.
You stood naked underneath one of three pipes.
One and half, two and half, or three and a half inches in diameter.
The water from the springs on the hills was in a cistern Yeah? And it dropped 20 ft on to your naked body.
And you get 56 imperial gallons of cold water going on you.
I think I'd better go and get some more water.
Oh, God The popularity of aerated or soda waters spread across the Empire.
In India, British Army officers discovered that mixing soda water and the drug quinine was the perfect tonic for victims of malaria.
Simply named Indian tonic water, it became not only the world's most celebrated medicinal drink but also the perfect mixer for gin.
Tom's going to learn how to extract the vital ingredient, quinine, from the bark of the South American Cinchona tree.
So what is this bark, then? This is bark from a tree.
Yeah, which one? It was Peruvian bark from the Cinchona tree.
They would have got the quinine out that way, by chewing it.
Or you can make tea with it.
You can boil it up in water.
It controls fever.
And it stops you shivering.
That's one of the thingsthe reasons they used to take it.
Which is quite separate from its anti-malarial properties, killing the malarial parasite.
I'm going to take the stuff that you've ground already.
This is the ground bark, and mix it up with this very strong alkali, calcium hydroxide.
Right.
And it releases the quinine.
This is the process that we're getting that one element out of all of these, then? Yes, we're going to isolate one.
It's like a needle in a haystack, I guess.
We will be able to isolate the quinine and none of the others.
Let's add the chloroform.
The solvent chloroform was also popular as a Victorian anaesthetic.
Queen Victoria was administered the drug for the birth of two of her children.
The quinine and will be dissolved inthe chloroform.
I'm going to really squeeze this extraction procedure.
The next stage is to add sulphuric acid, to separate the quinine from the chloroform.
Return that chloroform.
We want the custard layer, then, right? The quinine is in this top layer.
The custard layer, I like that.
And this would be very highly skilled work for an apprentice, as well.
This would be kind ofalmost, if you were going into a laboratory and doing something like this, it would be really kind of top of your game sort of stuff.
Tom's chemistry lesson is about to get even tougher Tell me if you want a break.
I'm all right so far.
.
.
as Mike adds ammonia to the solution, releasing a pungent odour.
I'd do it outside but I think that one of the reasons for showing you this is to show you what a profession you've joined.
Oh, wow.
That's the turning point.
Now, that means that all of the sulphate converted.
Right, let's leave that to heat up a little bit and see what happens.
Let's go and get some fresh air and a cup of tea.
OK, great.
I'll see if Nick wants to have a look.
Good idea.
Hi, Mike.
How's the quinine extraction going? You've arrived at just the right moment, mate.
The quinine is in here.
Let's see.
But we've also got a load of rubbish in there, and all the impurity we don't want, so I'm filtering it off.
The quinine should crystallise out.
That's if the process has worked.
Yep.
This is just such a tremendous story of the Victorian times, wasn't it? It's sort of how things changed, in terms of Well, the extraction, in particular.
Because quinine was valued so much.
There were wars were fought over quinine.
Well, certain people would say that it enabled Europeans to colonise Africa, the Dark Continent.
Because people were going over there exploring Africa, getting malaria and not coming back.
Yes.
But quinine, because of its anti-malarial properties, would actually allow people to come back.
You can see it crystallising as it's falling out.
Yes.
Adding the crystallised quinine to the pre-prepared soda water produces the classic Indian tonic water.
Just pick up one crystal.
It's probably way over the legal limit, but I don't think there was a legal limit in those days.
It was a damn sight safer than anything else they were doing.
There you are, Professor Barber.
Oh, fantastic.
Let's go and find some gin.
Sounds good to me.
HE LAUGHS Tonic water wasn't the only recipe to be brought home from the British Empire.
As pharmacists established themselves, customers came to them to make up all kinds of preparations.
Not only medicines but anything that required precision, including exotic food recipes.
This needs to be very, very, very much more precise than I'm used to.
I'll grab myself a bowl.
Ruth is attempting to recreate a recipe made famous in 1838 by two Worcestershire chemists, John Lea and William Perrins.
I tend to be quite a touchy-feely cook.
This precision, this being able to produce something exactly the same, time after time, has not brought in the money.
Worcestershire sauce began life as a recipe for curry powder brought back from India and given to local pharmacists Lea and Perrins to make up.
I've gone over, how annoying! An employee then suggested that it might work better as a sauce.
You see, if I was just cooking, it would have done, it would have been fine.
We've got ginger, obviously, and allspice.
Pepper, coriander, mace, brandy.
And asafetida.
An interesting substance.
It was used as an aid to digestion for centuries in Persia, which is where it's from.
It helps toit stops flatulence basically.
This, like many of these ingredients, were actually felt to have medicinal properties, of course, as well as being a nice taste.
That could be some of the reason why they're in here.
The asafetida, this is a sauce, a relish to eat with food so the fact that it might help to calm your digestion would be really useful, a benefit, a bonus.
Now, the vinegar.
But Lea and Perrins found the resulting mixture so distasteful that they abandoned it in the shop's cellar.
Years later, while clearing out the cellar, they discovered the sauce had fermented into something far more acceptable.
The new product was born.
My instinct is just to guess.
SHE LAUGHS Right, that's all of those in there.
A nice spicy, spicy mix.
If a recipe proved particularly appealing, there was nothing to stop pharmacists from selling their own preparation en masse.
Some of today's biggest brand names started from such humble origins.
Mr Lea and Mr Perrins thought it tasted utterly disgusting at this stage.
So Urgh, blinking heck, that's powerful! SHE LAUGHS It's strong.
But it's quite nice.
Maybe I've got a stronger palate than Mr Lea and Mr Perrins.
There, that looks quite good.
All I've got to do is come up with a name.
In the 1840s, getting the name right, getting the brand right was really important if you were to sell loads.
Barber and Goodman's Spectacular Shropshire Sauce.
Ruth's Spectacular Shropshire Sauce joins the pharmacy's new range of branded products.
The end of the process, isn't it? Yeah.
And just getting an insight into all the different processes that went into making this tonic water.
It is different, isn't it, the whole business of making stuff and then selling it.
You can see how people would have felt really proud of what they had achieved as well, in terms of seeing it through from the very inception.
There's a sense in which the chemist and druggist is becoming a much more powerful force in some ways.
Through, on the one hand, being a hard-headed businessman and making their shops into profitable going concerns and on the other hand, saying, we're going to introduce chemical knowledge into the pharmacy.
To celebrate their first week in business, Barber and Goodman are holding an open evening, a chance to offer some of their new products to the public and catch up on how their customers are doing.
Some Worcester sauce? You only need a tiny bit, it's strong.
A couple of drops on your chips sort of sauce.
Those sorts of flavours.
It's that scrunched up face! THEY LAUGH There's something about it that just gets me.
I've really enjoyed this first experience of early Victorian medicine.
It's been such a combination of so many things from the past and new experiments into the future.
We've been launching off now into the new science and if anything, this experience has really whetted my appetite for the next finding out, the next, where did it go from here.
BOTTLE POPS There we go! Once the actual steam kettle got going and the actual herbs came through, there was that 10 minute spot when the smell of rosemary came in and it was beautiful.
Once it got going, it was really exciting for me.
I've still got the bruise, unfortunately.
Let's have a look.
It's gone shades of yellow.
It's changing, like they do.
I would say those remedies have had no effect whatsoever.
What you you think? I would tend to agree.
All they've been is a nuisance, to be honest.
The main issue is actually going to bed knowing that I've got worm on my arm and lying there, not wanting to get the duvet on the worm with that knowledge in mind.
It's greasy and I'm constantly aware that I'm getting it on my clothes.
It doesn't really soak in, soI can't see the appeal, to be honest.
It's not looking like a good remedy to sell in modern-day times? I can't see it making it onto the market today.
I have found this, seeing how the Victorians approached pharmacy, fascinating.
There's a spirit, adventure, an entrepreneurism there.
We're understanding the nature of the interaction between the medicine and the patients themselves.
Very, very nice.
In fact, I would swish it around a bit before I swallowed it.
You can use it as a gargle? Yes, and it helped get rid of the soreness that I had in my throat.
I can actually say, yes, it has helped a lot.
Has it eased your breathing? It's much better.
Before, as I breathed out, it was very crackly, it was very difficult, a typical asthmatic type feeling.
It has helped, I can feel as though I can breathe normally again, for the first time in more than three weeks.
Oh, lovely.
I'm dying to ask, how long did that plaster last? About three hours.
Well, that's more than I thought actually.
What was it like? Well, I've never had chamois leather next to my skin but it is quite comfortable but I didn't get any feeling of the Frankincense.
Right.
There didn't seem to be any essence coming out at all.
When it fell off, it went straight to the floor? Literally, it just peeled off and dropped at my feet.
So, let's have a toast.
Cheers, or perhaps we should say, good health! May you all come back as customers, often! SHE LAUGHS By the end of the 1840s, scientific advances were beginning to filter down to the high street pharmacist.
Old ideas of bloodletting and purging gave way to exciting new techniques and cures.
Pharmacists would spearhead a whole new range of consumer experiences.
Nipple shields.
Blood and stomach pills Next time on Victorian Pharmacy the medicine that was supposed to cure everything.
Soap powder acts as a laxative.
Yep, I'm willing to try everything.
The discovery of how to kill germs.
OK, look at that go.
Give me a shout if it gets too much or anything.
And more Victorian contraptions are unleashed on the public.
Look at that! She's almost doing that by herself!
Morning.
Morning.
At its heart stands the pharmacy, a treasure house of potions and remedies from a century and a half ago.
Now, in a unique experiment, Ruth Goodman, Nick Barber and Tom Quick are opening the doors to the Victorian pharmacy, recreating a high-street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea.
How can I help? They'll bring the pharmacy to life, sourcing ingredients, mixing potions and dispensing cures.
But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic and cold cures were made from opium, the team will need to be highly selective.
They'll only make safe versions of traditional remedies and try them out on carefully selected customers.
The start was like the Wild West.
People didn't know what was good and bad.
Try and get a bit of speed up Oh, there we go.
The pharmacy was something that affected everybody's lives in one way or another.
They'll discover an age of social transformation that brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time, heralding a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern high-street chemist as we know it today.
The Victorian pharmacy opens its doors in 1837, the year when the teenage Queen Victoria ascended the throne.
Wow, look at this place! This is fantastic.
Ooh, that smell! It's much bigger than I thought it would be.
There's a heck of a lot of stuff here, isn't there? There's a tremendous amount of stuff.
Fresh from her time on the Victorian farm, Ruth Goodman will now be applying her skills in new areas, from medicines to cosmetics.
As a domestic historian, she knows just how important the pharmacy was to ordinary people.
Doctors were expensive.
Really, on a day-to-day basis, only the rich were using doctors.
Occasionally a poor person might be able to save up for a consultation, maybe a doctor might offer some free consultation, but in general most people in the 19th century turned to the pharmacist for the majority of their healthcare.
Oh! It's a beautiful place to be in, we're going to be able to make this work really well.
Nick Barber is professor of the practice of pharmacy at the University of London's School of Pharmacy.
Parrot Brand polishing soap and Monkey Brand.
Things like Sloan's Liniment, which people use nowadays, and Zam-Buk.
As the pharmacist, he will be responsible for recommending and preparing all the remedies and medicines that his shop dispenses.
It's a unique opportunity for Nick to learn how his profession evolved.
It's a fantastic chance to recreate what it was like to be a Victorian pharmacist at a time when pharmacy was completely different to how it is today.
Pharmacists were creating new things, lots of innovation happening then, the growth of chemistry and pharmacists were experimenting and developing new sorts of treatments as well.
We're going to have fun with this! I'm going to see how this sign's getting on.
OK, see you.
There's old pill-rolling devices here.
Look at these liquids up here, this is a tincture of zingib.
No Victorian pharmacy would be complete without an apprentice.
And these are all the Latin names I'm going to have to know about.
That job falls to Tom Quick.
A PhD student in the history of medicine, he's hoping to put theory into practice.
The natural products were all in their Latin names.
And so much equipment as well, right? It's remarkable, isn't it? Really, what I think of as history isn't about just seeing things behind glass cases.
It's about people's lives and what people did on a day-to-day basis.
We've got all the kit here, which was all needed in those days.
We've got, erm We've the balance there, right? Yeah, you'd be weighing things out carefully.
You know, careful being the key word, because you killed people if you got these things wrong.
Some of these things I was taught when I was an undergraduate, but I've never used them professionally.
So actually to do these sorts of things, to go back to mixing, to pounding, to compounding things is an enormous challenge.
The front of shop is where they will come face to face with the public.
In the early Victorian age, new ideas on how to treat illness were beginning to filter through to the high street, but in this moment of change from traditional to scientific medicine, many of the cures the pharmacy will sell are based on old beliefs and remedies.
Poison of lance headed viper.
Oh, my giddy.
In 1837, despite the dangerous products on the shelves, anyone could trade as a pharmacist.
Even grocers were setting up as chemists.
Hee-hee, look at that! Wow! That looks so good.
It's just fantastic to see your name above a shop like that.
Yeah You'd want a good standing within the community to be a pharmacist.
It was a hub of the town, really, and people used to come here Everybody's ill, everybody comes to the pharmacy.
Opening a new shop was a massive investment, and pharmacists needed to be entrepreneurs to survive.
Marketing was everything.
Like many of their predecessors, the new Barber & Goodman pharmacy is having a grand opening.
BAND PLAYS: "Blaze Away" In order to understand how people responded to 19th century remedies, Barber & Goodman will dispense authentic but safe Victorian medicines to carefully chosen volunteers.
The pharmacy's first customer is Sue Dodd, who has worked as a nurse for 35 years.
Hello, Mr Barber.
I have a very bad cough, is there anything that you can help? Well, have you tried modern cures for a cold? Do you think they work? Some do, although you can't beat natural local honey and lemon for sore throats.
Generally things like that.
Well, in Victorian times what we'd have given you is Dr John Collis Browne's Chlorodyne.
I've got the Chlorodyne here.
It was invented when he was an Indian army doctor for cholera.
It didn't treat cholera, but it became a very popular treatment for coughs, colds, chests and things like this.
It's got in chloroform, it's got, eropium in it and it's got cannabis in it.
Why would they put those things in? Well, it makes people feel better, as you might imagine.
Many pharmacists made up their own versions of Chlorodyne, but the high opiate content made these medicines addictive, and death from overdose was a real risk.
Collis Browne's mixture is still on sale today, but with a low, non-addictive dose of morphine.
Opium suppresses cough, so if people do have troublesome coughs, then it would help bring that down.
We'll knock out something for you which is a bit safer.
And will it have the opium and things like that in? No, we'll find one without those sorts of things.
Oh, good! Just natural herbs we'll use for this one.
That sounds wonderful.
Before his customer returns for her authentic Victorian cough medicine, Nick will need to find a less risky recipe.
Horehound and aniseed.
Try that, see what that looks like.
Balsam of horehound and aniseed.
That's it, so what have we got in? Paregoric elixir The chemist's bible was the Pharmacopoeia, which listed all the remedies and potions of the day.
The one we can't use, definitely, is paregoric, and paregoric is camphorated opium, it's a form of opium, so again we've got the morphine in.
So we need to take that balsam of horehound and aniseed and try and reformulate it using current knowledge and using things which are a bit safer than some of the ingredients.
My goodness, it's gorgeous at this time of year.
Isn't it? Nick's chosen remedy, balsam of horehound, was made up largely of natural herbs and flowers.
Cleavers, this is what we're after, yeah? Perfect, exactly.
The job of sourcing the essential ingredients falls to Ruth and herbalist Eleanor Gallia.
Eleanor is an expert in plant medicine.
A Victorian pharmacist would have needed her knowledge of the natural world.
So why do we want cleavers in a cough medicine, then? They're the most wonderful immune stimulant, and they're very cleansing for the body.
With respiratory catarrh conditions, the first thing you need to do is encourage the phlegm away from the chest, so the body is very good at cleansing itself and draining itself.
A pharmacy needed to maintain a healthy stock of medicinal plants.
So do we need anything else, as well as the cleavers, while we're out.
Plantain.
Oh, that's quite a common thing.
The surrounding countryside was a valuable and free resource.
They like to be stood on, planted into the ground.
While Ruth is gathering the ingredients for the cough medicine, at the back of the shop, Nick and Tom open up the pharmacy's laboratory.
Wow! Look at this place.
This is going to be amazing, isn't it? The nerve centre of their business, this is where the pharmacist would experiment with new cures and manufacture drugs and potions.
It's halfway between an alchemist's cave and a kitchen and a storeroom and all sorts, really.
Yeah, this is a really interesting space for me.
This is the place that probably changed the most dramatically over the time period we're looking at, 1840s - '50s.
This is kind of like a kitchen, right? You've got all these ingredients over here, these sort of herbal things.
And you'd be here at the bench, making your latest concoction to sell in the shop.
Yes, to sell to the lucky public out there.
But by the end of the century, this is kind of more a place of chemical experimentation.
We've even got a hammer for pounding the herbs.
What I hope to learn is some of the techniques which Victorian pharmacists used to use, the manual skills which some of us have forgotten.
I also hope to learn some of the different sorts of approaches which they had to medicine in those days.
The industrial revolution was at its height and half the population of Britain lived in towns.
Overcrowding, poor sanitation and grinding poverty left many people vulnerable to disease.
Hundreds of thousands died in the crowded, sewage-ridden cities.
But Victorians had only the haziest of ideas about what caused illness or how to treat it.
And so they often fell back on traditional remedies as Nick is about to discover as he prepares a bruise medicine made from earthworms.
Well, I didn't think I'd be doing this when I was doing a Victorian remedy - digging, rather bizarrely, for earthworms.
Earthworms were part of an old remedy which was around before Victorian times, from medieval times, really, in which people would take the earthworm and they would boil up earthworms with olive oil and some form of wine into oil of earthworms, which they put on bruises.
Here's one.
Another one to add to my haul.
There must be easier ways to treat bruises than this.
Customers would often ask a pharmacist to make up favourite traditional remedies like this.
You can always say, if people believe in things, then things do work.
The power of belief on health is very great.
Oil of Earthworm - who would have thought that was a Victorian recipe? It's obviously something that has come from long before, an old idea, one of those things that has hung on into the early part of the Victorian medical experience.
In the proper recipe we use real earthworms and boil them in oil.
But, in the interest of worm welfare, we're not going to do that.
We're going to use these dried worms, exactly the same species, which we've obtained.
In the pharmacy at this time, you took things which were whole and you had to break them up by physical force.
I've always been fond of earthworms.
Charles Darwin spent a lot of his life studying them.
And I think he'd be upset by this.
I don't think the worms would have been any use at all in their bruise.
I think probably it just came from the old days when people saw things that looked similar and related them.
So, for example, the skin of an earthworm, when you take it out of the soil, does look a bit like a bruise.
They didn't understand what a bruise was as we do now, of course.
In those days, there wasn't much science around, so if things looked similar, that was probably good enough for most people.
We can add some red wine.
It seems rather a waste, but That's now ready to heat up.
I've got the stove lit over here.
I'll put it on there.
I'll bring them over here to cool and take these lucky ones back to the garden.
There's a strong placebo effect with all sorts of treatments.
Even in modern days, we can get 20 to 30% effect size from a placebo treatment.
We know that, if the doctor is very positive about it and says it will work, it is more effective than not.
That's a nasty bruise, how did you get that? Playing around with a tennis ball.
James Scott is a pharmacy student.
common throughout history and there have been lots of remedies for it.
We're going to try the oil of earthworm.
How literally? Literally earthworm, Mixed with olive oil and some red wine.
We're just going to put that on the top.
Now, we're going to leave that.
I think tomorrow you should try applying this again, probably morning and evening, and then we'll see how you do in a few days' time.
Come back then.
OK, thank you very much.
Bye.
Pharmacist's apprentice, Tom, is hard at work setting up the carboys.
So that's the iron oxide, I believe.
I'm going to try and make a lovely purple colour so that we can The idea would be to attract as many people in by demonstrating your pharmaceutical skill in some way, basically.
I think we'll just see what happens for the moment.
At a time when many customers couldn't read, these tall, colourful storage bottles were a clear sign that this was a chemist's shop.
So, very red.
This is a washing soda.
Mix them together.
The mixture's slightly purple.
We're just going to have to see what happens.
Learning how to mix the chemicals precisely enough to produce a successful colour was a fundamental test of a young apprentice's skill.
Half purple, half red now.
You don't want to mess up this.
How can you trust a chemist who can't even make the colours that enable you to recognise them as a druggist, you know? I don't know what to do here.
Yeah, it's not really working that well, is it? Am I looking at the right thing? Yes.
Plantago lanceolota, that's the lanceolate plantain.
Ruth and Eleanor have found another wild plant, the common plantain, for Nick's cough cure.
So what's good about this for a cough medicine? It's used in all sorts of allergies and irritations in the lungs.
Once the lungs are irritated, then they become inflamed and then they produced more mucus.
So, plantain soothes and tones the mucous membrane.
The mucosa is incredibly important because it's where the oxygen that you breathe in dissolves from gaseous form into a liquid form.
And you can actually take it in a tea, you can use it in hay fever when you have that problem, the allergy problem.
So it's a very useful plant to befriend.
So what about the more exotic ingredients, those things from foreign parts? You'd buy those in, maybe from London.
So I suppose they are being gathered by herbalists in other parts of the world, for sale.
Herbalists and collectors.
And they still are.
It's really interesting, how, at the beginning of the 19th century, there's this sort of body of herbal knowledge.
I mean, people like John Boot And his son, Jesse.
.
And his son, Jesse, exactly.
Boots the Chemists, the founders, they begin as a little medical herbalist shop, selling botanicals in one form or another, inspired by all sorts of different people.
Jesse himself, Jesse Boot, John's son, was very interesting.
He studied pharmacy in his spare time, and then they employed a chemist.
And the herbalist business was no longer making money.
Moving into.
And the druggists were so big at the time, and they were very much about making money.
And so it was in their interest not to be.
encouraging too much.
Well, not to be encouraging people to be using their own medicines and growing them.
The word 'drug' derives from the Dutch 'droog' for dried plant.
Today, there are more than 7,000 medical compounds derived from plants.
Tom is edging closer to a near-perfect colour.
It looks an all right colour now.
All we need to do, really, is dilute it so, hopefully, a little bit of light comes through it.
It's very thick.
So I'm just going to go for it and pour this straight in, try not to make too much of a mess, and see what happens.
Having achieved a reasonable purple, Tom moves onto the yellow carboy.
One explanation for the fixed colours of the carboys reveals an ancient theory that still influenced early Victorian medicine Yeah, that's about right, I think.
.
.
that each of the colours represented one of the four elements Job done.
.
.
or humours, that made up the body.
The four humours were black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile.
And those really equated to things which could be seen coming out of the body, to put it basically.
And this was how they understood the body.
The body had too much of things inside it, and therefore things would come out when it had too much of that humour.
So it could be kept in balance.
Belief in the four humours persisted well into the 19th century and an excess of blood in particular was thought to be the cause of many illnesses.
Bloodletting was big business and a jar of healthy, voracious leeches was a real money-spinner for the Victorian pharmacist.
Horrible looking things, aren't they? Carl Peters-Bond runs a leech farm in South Wales.
What did they use them for in Victorian times? Basically, where they used to cut people to remove blood, which is obviously very painful, the leech can bite.
It sort of cuts a little Y-shaped hole.
A leech this size would probably take about 8ml, and you'd probably lose about 50 afterwards.
It's almost a luxury because it's painless, fairly painless.
And were they luxury items or were they everyday items? They would probably have been a very expensive item.
I would consider them a luxury.
Go on then, let's see what they're like.
Well, it feels a bit like a slug.
It feels very leech-ish.
So these would be picked out and they would be put on to a patient Whoops! Not too keen on getting stabbed by that end, I must admit.
I'm a bit nervous about it, I have to say.
Carl's partner, Christopher Peters-Bond, has bravely volunteered to befriend the leech.
Quite a bit smaller than the other leeches.
These have been starved for almost two years, so their gut is completely empty of blood.
You just lay them on the skin? Yep.
Oh, it's really arched its head, hasn't it?.
Yes.
That very different to when they were just holding on my skin.
It's just tasting about.
Yeah, there he goes.
He's sort of having a bit of a nibble.
I can feel like a little bee sting.
But apart from that, no, it's next to nothing at all.
That's what they've evolved over millions of years to do.
Bite painlessly and remove the blood.
It's a natural pharmaceutical tool, really.
This is a really medieval sight, isn't it? We've got 2,000 years of history here.
This great long Western European tradition of bloodletting.
But that's very human of us, isn't it, the hanging on to tradition? "My mother did it, my grandmother did it, my great-grandmother did it.
"Of course it's good for you!" Here's one of its sisters that have.
What a contrast! One hungry leech, one leech three-quarters of the way through his dinner.
It's like me and my pudding stomach.
However full my dinner stomach is, there's always room for pudding.
The leech injects an anti-coagulant when it bites and the wound can bleed for up to 10 hours after the leech has dropped off.
Even modern first aid can do very little to stop the bleeding.
It will just keep on going.
It's about 50ml.
It shows how potent the chemicals are in its saliva to really produced that effect for such a long period of time.
How do you feel after it? I feel fine, to be honest with you.
I don't really feel any different to before.
A pleasant experience, do you think? It's certainly not as unpleasant as it looks, perhaps.
It's All a bit more straight forward.
Yes.
I'm surprised that there's no pain at all or anything like that.
I can completely understand how someone might sit through several of these, thinking that they were doing themselves some good.
Yeah, it certainly beats all the other bloodletting methods, doesn't it? It's so much better than being cut with knives or.
I don't think I would have volunteered for having a knife cut into me.
I hope you still feel as positive in 10 hours' time when you've changed the bandages six times! After use, the leech goes back in the jar and the bloody bandages are dried out, ready to use again.
It wasn't until the mid-19th century that Victorians understood the dangers of cross-infection, so disease spread easily.
Right, next job.
But while leeches remained popular, the ever-inventive Victorians came up with man-made alternatives for drawing blood, including the scarifier.
They'd press this button here and the blades would shoot across.
Oh, it would be horrible.
And then I suppose, once you've got it in, you've got to draw the blood out, haven't you? Absolutely.
It would just clot otherwise, quite quickly.
So if you want to be losing blood, which is the idea, then you need something to draw it out.
And they've got this beautiful bit of really Victorian kit here, which is a vacuum pump.
It's like a bicycle pump in reverse.
They knew how to make equipment, didn't they, in those days? It's just so Victorian-looking, isn't it? Beautifully engineered and turned.
Once a cut had been made in the skin, the vacuum inside the glass cup drew the blood out.
The air out, and then straight on.
That's it.
I can see it coming up.
Wow! Look at that!.
That's rising.
.
Yeah! You can see a bit of redness to it as well.
.
It's bringing the blood up to the surface, probably breaking little capillaries.
The blood would be welling up out of there as well, wouldn't it?.
Yeah, I mean, if you made all those little cuts, that would be quite a different thing.
Drawing out evil vapours that had somehow been clogging things up.
I could live with that.
I'm not sure I could live with that.
Yes.
All the ingredients for the balsam of horehound cough medicine have been brought to the lab, where herbalist Eleanor joins Nick.
This is horehound, is it?.
Yes.
.
Where does horehound live? Is it a big plant or a little plant? It's a shrub.
It's a kind of bluey green shrub.
She's soaked the herbs in alcohol.
In your original recipe, you had syrup of squill.
Yes.
Now I'm sure you're familiar with squill.
Yes, yes.
Can be rather toxic, but very old medicine.
We've actually got squill and we've got it in an oxymel.
What is an oxymel? An oxymel is honey and vinegar.
A member of the lily family, squill has been used for centuries to loosen mucus from the lungs.
So another tincture that we've got is cleavers, which is a really common herb, as Ruth and I discovered.
Plantain, this is an interesting one.
Again, a very common herb.
And then the final herb we've got is the elecampane, a huge, tall, yellow, golden flower, a bit like a sunflower but with enormous leaves.
So that is our preparation ready to go.
A couple of teaspoons of treacle.
Hence "the spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
" Absolutely.
Slow job of stirring this in.
The more patience that you can work with, like cooking, the better.
So this is the oxymel of squill.
You can keep stirring as we put it in.
The squill's been going for a long time, hasn't it? I think it was in the Ebers Papyrus, which is the oldest recorded formulary, if you like, which was 1500 BC in Egyptian times, something like that.
And apparently it was considered so effective that it was an object of temple worship.
Really? Yep.
So that's lovely.
Ready to bottle it now? Yes.
Early pharmacists put art and skill into the medicines they created.
Thank you, Doctor.
Thank you very much.
But in order to make a profit it was essential that the customer was satisfied, and that word got out to the local community that here was a medicine that could be trusted.
It smells fantastic, I have to say.
Have a smell.
It smells quite nice.
It's half a teaspoon, three times a day in a glass of water.
See how it is.
It's very, very strong.
Mm.
Oh, yes.
HE LAUGHS It's clearing something.
Here's the bottle.
We'd like you to give that a try.
Come back in a few days and we'll see how you feel.
I'll let you know.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
Victorian cities and other industrial centres were notorious for thick smogs or "pea-soupers".
This noxious mix of smoke and sulphur dioxide, thrown up by the burning of coal, made breathing-related illnesses a scourge of the age.
Ruth is preparing another type of cough treatment.
Oh, that's heavy! I have a volunteer coming in, who says he's willing to try out a plaster.
This isn't quite the same as modern plaster! This is a medical treatment, something you put on the skin to draw things out of the body.
It can be all sorts of things, like there are plasters that fit on the head to help draw away, working for headaches.
There are plasters that help to sort of, like earache, you could put plasters around the back of the ears that will help to draw humours out.
All sorts of conditions were believed to be able to be relieved in this way.
Of all the sort of early Victorian forms of medicine, in some ways this is one of the least invasive, one of the most gentle methods because you're not breaking the skin or anything, you're just applying it on the surface of the skin.
Certainly that warmth and the vapours that rise off it, even if they do nothing else, can be really soothing.
I've got to melt this wax down, which is going to take a little while, and then I add the olive oil.
Plasters were a common preparation for many conditions throughout the 19th century.
These sticky leather strips could be infused with different active ingredients and were used to treat a variety of ailments.
This is the most active ingredient.
This is an oil of Frankincense.
It smells wonderful.
I just want a couple of drops of this.
Some ailments were treated with more dangerous ingredients - the poisonous belladonna plant to relieve muscle spasms, lead for cuts, and opium for local pain relief.
Gosh, as that goes into the warm oil, boy, can I smell that! Frankincense is one of those valuable spices well, it's not a spice, it's a resin from a tree, but it's one of those really important ones in the history of medicine.
It's particularly good at sort of clearing things out from the chest.
That's why it's an important ingredient for this plaster.
Next door in the treatment room, Tom is using a favourite Victorian implement, the bronchial kettle, to try and relief the symptoms of customer Keith Dodd's dry, wheezy cough.
What we've got to try and help you with that today is a thing called a bronchial kettle.
Looks very interesting.
The idea of this is it's going to create a lot of steam and so on, and it's got some herbs in there, and what we're going to do is get you, if you want to come around here and I can sit you in this little booth that we've made in the back here.
With added herbs and Tom's self-made tent, the bronchial kettle is an industrial step up from placing the customer's head under a towel over a bowl of steaming water.
We'll try and create a kind of steamy environment.
Hopefully what will happen is we'll get a kind of nice thick steam coming up, and you mentioned the cough was dry It's a very dry cough, yeah.
And so what the idea behind it would have been would be to counteract the dryness of the cough in some way by creating a very wet environment for you.
Now this is the scary bit.
Ruth now has to cut out a template for her cough plaster.
"Place the leather on a thick "and smooth it before putting on the shape.
" Now I've got to cut a paper stencil.
A decent bit of card.
That's sort of the shape I want .
.
ish.
Oh, I like making things.
And to make it stay in place, I'm to wet it.
I obviously don't need very much at all.
OK.
So all I've got to do now is cut around, and then I could pack these in boxes.
You put a bit of wax-proof paper between each one and you can stack them up in boxes so you could sell a box of cough plasters, a box of headache plasters.
Although it's a very old idea and sort of a very old technique, the whole way of packaging it and selling it is actually really new.
There we go.
That's me first chest plaster.
I do have a bit of a cough, yes.
You do? And what sort of a cough is it? A bronchial sort of cough.
A bit asthmatic.
Retired army medic Anthony Dunford has come in to try the plaster.
What I'm hoping is that as the wax melts it will release the active ingredient, which is Frankincense.
Frankincense.
So you're going to get that sort of pungent smell rising up under your nose.
You'll be breathing it in.
It's pointy end down.
So that just goes on the centre there.
We just smooth that.
I can feel the warmth of your body is melting that wax.
It's more pliable than when I put it on.
That seems to be sticking.
Oh, it is, isn't it?! Hey, the self-adhesive plaster! SHE LAUGHS Perhaps I don't need my bandages after all.
The Victorians obviously would have worn it as long as possible, two or three days, so it is really a matter of how much you can put up with before you need to get it off and have a wash.
I will persevere.
Are you getting any benefit from that there? Yes, it's definitely helping.
I can actually breathe really deeply now, which I couldn't have done 10 minutes ago, so it's really helped.
I'm certainly breathing more easily at the moment.
As you seem to be enjoying it so much, then, I'll leave you there for a while.
OK, don't forget me.
OK, see you in a bit.
The bronchial kettle was one way of clearing the airwaves, but another popular method was spitting.
If a shop wanted to keep the phlegm off the floor, it was in their interests to provide a spittoon.
What we've got here is a spittoon for of phlegm.
Would have been of the worst duties in the shop, to have to empty this thing, basically.
Cleaning them out was a serious health hazard as the spittoon could easily be contaminated with tuberculosis, a common disease in Victorian times.
The way we think about medicines today and disease today, this idea of lots of different people spitting into the same bowl, it seems bizarre.
But actually, if you think about certainly early 19th century ideas of disease, it's not so weird because the idea is that really, disease is like a visible thing.
This is before bacteriology, remember, so there's no idea of a hidden substance there that's going to give you a disease.
So although there might be a big sort of, the way we might think of it as a huge amount of tuberculosis and all sorts of things festering in this swamp, really, actually, as far as they were concerned, as long as you get rid of the mucus itself, no problem.
Few things worried Victorians more than their bowel movements.
The pharmacist was able to offer a very special treatment to keep them regular.
Victorians believed there was nothing like a good purge to make them feel better.
It was what you needed to do, clear yourself out.
This is something called the everlasting pill.
It's one of my favourite remedies from the Victorian age.
Particularly at this time, people wanted to purge the body, and this was one of the ways of doing it.
What they used was a pill a bit like this, which was made out of something called antimony.
Antimony is a really heavy metal.
It's quite a toxic metal, which we wouldn't use these days, but in those days they didn't see it as that.
They'd take this, it would go into their gut, a little bit of the antimony would be dissolved, they'd have vomiting, they'd have diarrhoea, and the pill would pass through.
It's called the everlasting pill because it's fished out of the faeces at the end, washed up, put in a bottle on the shelf, and any member of the family who wants a good purge takes it the next time they want to take it.
Potentially it's passed on through the generations.
Some doctors began to question the wisdom of using such dangerous techniques.
The search for alternative, less risky treatments was on.
Malvern Spa in Worcestershire offered an alternative therapy - the revolutionary new hydrotherapy cure.
Hello, John.
Nice to meet you.
I'm in such trepidation about this.
Don't worry, it's only cold water.
Remember, it's five or six in the morning and I need your help to wet the sheets.
OK.
Dr John Harcup has brought the water cure to Blists Hill.
Have you done this yourself? Not wrapped in a white sheet, but I had a cold bath on many occasions.
By cold do you mean? Oh, yes.
Very cold.
We did some research work in the 1990s about this.
It was amazing.
I had my blood test before and after a cold bath, and my white cell count went up dramatically.
So this is actually .
.
stimulating the immune system.
And it really is.
I mean, did they know that in the Victorian period? No, they hadn't a clue.
So why were they doing it, then? What's this supposed to do for me? This is supposed to relax you.
To relax? Yes.
Wet sheets?! SHE LAUGHS I don't call that very relaxing! Well, this is the effect of water, you see.
Your heart works more efficiently and harder, and you get a better circulation in other parts of the body.
It was so different from bleeding and purging, and these heavy-metal poisons.
So this is a cure for the same sorts of things that all those really invasive techniques were being used for? That's right.
Of course, non-invasive, really.
The Malvern Water Cure was first offered in 1842 by two local doctors who were appalled by the dangers of the drugs and techniques in common use.
You'll warm it up very quickly.
Oh Honestly.
I wish it did hurry up and warm up! You're impatient.
You're an impatient patient.
God, I am.
I hate being cold! You're going to feel better because you've been relaxed and you've been stimulated by the cold water.
Strange though it is, I would rather do this than swallow a dose of arsenic, mercurywhatever.
Lead.
Lead.
Exactly.
So you could either go to your physician and have something really poisonous prescribed Yes, or you could come to Malvern and Have the health regime.
That's right.
One day sort me out? No, no, no.
You came for three weeks, at least.
Oh, right.
So you've got all the accommodation costs, yeah.
It was four guineas a week.
That's a lot of money! It's £400.
There were quite a number of famous names on the patient list.
Yes.
Charles Darwin came and he ended up by saying he didn't think the Water Cure was quackery.
Right.
And Florence Nightingale came when she collapsed after working too hard doing the report for the Royal Sanitary Commission.
Oh, right.
And she wrote, seven years afterwards, that she owed her life to the Water Cure at Malvern.
Really? Yes.
So how long do I have to stay at this? An hour.
Right.
Great.
And then I'll come and unwrap you.
OK I expect you'll be asleep, actually.
OK.
Cheerio.
Bye.
I don't like having my feet all tied up.
I always pull the bedclothes out of the bottom of the bed when I go to bed.
The Malvern Water Cure was far more than just being wrapped in wet sheets.
Plenty of hill-walking and the drinking of endless glasses of spa water were all part of the regime.
Taking the waters was hugely fashionable, and manufacturers began producing drinks that mimicked the taste and fizziness of spring water.
These quickly established themselves as popular health drinks.
Scientist, Mike Bullivant, will be running the pharmacy laboratory.
His working knowledge of 19th-century chemistry will be invaluable.
Aerated gassed waters were a really big part of the sales for pharmacists.
They made lots of money on it.
Oh, hopefully.
The basic ingredients are cheap enough, aren't they? So how do you make gaseous water? Three ingredients.
First is water, obviously.
Good start.
We've got citric acid.
Right.
Which is an ingredient in today's waters.
Oh, right.
It's perfectly harmless.
Second Or third ingredient, sodium bicarbonate, baking soda.
Another harmless compound.
I can see then gassing together there, the gas being produced.
The carbon dioxide forming.
So there's your aerated water.
And the acid test is, does it pop when you open it? OK, give it a go.
CORK POPS Whoa! Result.
That's a fairly tight seal on there.
Nice design, there.
This is a good bottle, as well, isn't it? One of the big problems in the early days was that producing this water produced pressure, and the bottles weren't strong enough.
And in the early days the pharmacists used to have thick woollen jumpers on.
They were told to wear them to protect them from the broken glass if the bottle exploded.
They tried various other bottles.
I've got a couple that they tried.
This was a bottle which they produced because one of the problems was if you produced a normal bottle, put a cork in it, as you did, as the cork dried out, it shrank, pops out.
And therefore, they produced this bottle which has a round base, so it can't stand and let the cork dry out.
It's put down, it rests on its side, so the cork was kept permanently wet.
Right, here we are, shallow bath.
And this will prepare you for going up the hills.
It's to tone you up.
Tone me up.
Argh! Blimey! Ohh Now, there is other things we can do with the water.
We can give you a douche.
You stood naked underneath one of three pipes.
One and half, two and half, or three and a half inches in diameter.
The water from the springs on the hills was in a cistern Yeah? And it dropped 20 ft on to your naked body.
And you get 56 imperial gallons of cold water going on you.
I think I'd better go and get some more water.
Oh, God The popularity of aerated or soda waters spread across the Empire.
In India, British Army officers discovered that mixing soda water and the drug quinine was the perfect tonic for victims of malaria.
Simply named Indian tonic water, it became not only the world's most celebrated medicinal drink but also the perfect mixer for gin.
Tom's going to learn how to extract the vital ingredient, quinine, from the bark of the South American Cinchona tree.
So what is this bark, then? This is bark from a tree.
Yeah, which one? It was Peruvian bark from the Cinchona tree.
They would have got the quinine out that way, by chewing it.
Or you can make tea with it.
You can boil it up in water.
It controls fever.
And it stops you shivering.
That's one of the thingsthe reasons they used to take it.
Which is quite separate from its anti-malarial properties, killing the malarial parasite.
I'm going to take the stuff that you've ground already.
This is the ground bark, and mix it up with this very strong alkali, calcium hydroxide.
Right.
And it releases the quinine.
This is the process that we're getting that one element out of all of these, then? Yes, we're going to isolate one.
It's like a needle in a haystack, I guess.
We will be able to isolate the quinine and none of the others.
Let's add the chloroform.
The solvent chloroform was also popular as a Victorian anaesthetic.
Queen Victoria was administered the drug for the birth of two of her children.
The quinine and will be dissolved inthe chloroform.
I'm going to really squeeze this extraction procedure.
The next stage is to add sulphuric acid, to separate the quinine from the chloroform.
Return that chloroform.
We want the custard layer, then, right? The quinine is in this top layer.
The custard layer, I like that.
And this would be very highly skilled work for an apprentice, as well.
This would be kind ofalmost, if you were going into a laboratory and doing something like this, it would be really kind of top of your game sort of stuff.
Tom's chemistry lesson is about to get even tougher Tell me if you want a break.
I'm all right so far.
.
.
as Mike adds ammonia to the solution, releasing a pungent odour.
I'd do it outside but I think that one of the reasons for showing you this is to show you what a profession you've joined.
Oh, wow.
That's the turning point.
Now, that means that all of the sulphate converted.
Right, let's leave that to heat up a little bit and see what happens.
Let's go and get some fresh air and a cup of tea.
OK, great.
I'll see if Nick wants to have a look.
Good idea.
Hi, Mike.
How's the quinine extraction going? You've arrived at just the right moment, mate.
The quinine is in here.
Let's see.
But we've also got a load of rubbish in there, and all the impurity we don't want, so I'm filtering it off.
The quinine should crystallise out.
That's if the process has worked.
Yep.
This is just such a tremendous story of the Victorian times, wasn't it? It's sort of how things changed, in terms of Well, the extraction, in particular.
Because quinine was valued so much.
There were wars were fought over quinine.
Well, certain people would say that it enabled Europeans to colonise Africa, the Dark Continent.
Because people were going over there exploring Africa, getting malaria and not coming back.
Yes.
But quinine, because of its anti-malarial properties, would actually allow people to come back.
You can see it crystallising as it's falling out.
Yes.
Adding the crystallised quinine to the pre-prepared soda water produces the classic Indian tonic water.
Just pick up one crystal.
It's probably way over the legal limit, but I don't think there was a legal limit in those days.
It was a damn sight safer than anything else they were doing.
There you are, Professor Barber.
Oh, fantastic.
Let's go and find some gin.
Sounds good to me.
HE LAUGHS Tonic water wasn't the only recipe to be brought home from the British Empire.
As pharmacists established themselves, customers came to them to make up all kinds of preparations.
Not only medicines but anything that required precision, including exotic food recipes.
This needs to be very, very, very much more precise than I'm used to.
I'll grab myself a bowl.
Ruth is attempting to recreate a recipe made famous in 1838 by two Worcestershire chemists, John Lea and William Perrins.
I tend to be quite a touchy-feely cook.
This precision, this being able to produce something exactly the same, time after time, has not brought in the money.
Worcestershire sauce began life as a recipe for curry powder brought back from India and given to local pharmacists Lea and Perrins to make up.
I've gone over, how annoying! An employee then suggested that it might work better as a sauce.
You see, if I was just cooking, it would have done, it would have been fine.
We've got ginger, obviously, and allspice.
Pepper, coriander, mace, brandy.
And asafetida.
An interesting substance.
It was used as an aid to digestion for centuries in Persia, which is where it's from.
It helps toit stops flatulence basically.
This, like many of these ingredients, were actually felt to have medicinal properties, of course, as well as being a nice taste.
That could be some of the reason why they're in here.
The asafetida, this is a sauce, a relish to eat with food so the fact that it might help to calm your digestion would be really useful, a benefit, a bonus.
Now, the vinegar.
But Lea and Perrins found the resulting mixture so distasteful that they abandoned it in the shop's cellar.
Years later, while clearing out the cellar, they discovered the sauce had fermented into something far more acceptable.
The new product was born.
My instinct is just to guess.
SHE LAUGHS Right, that's all of those in there.
A nice spicy, spicy mix.
If a recipe proved particularly appealing, there was nothing to stop pharmacists from selling their own preparation en masse.
Some of today's biggest brand names started from such humble origins.
Mr Lea and Mr Perrins thought it tasted utterly disgusting at this stage.
So Urgh, blinking heck, that's powerful! SHE LAUGHS It's strong.
But it's quite nice.
Maybe I've got a stronger palate than Mr Lea and Mr Perrins.
There, that looks quite good.
All I've got to do is come up with a name.
In the 1840s, getting the name right, getting the brand right was really important if you were to sell loads.
Barber and Goodman's Spectacular Shropshire Sauce.
Ruth's Spectacular Shropshire Sauce joins the pharmacy's new range of branded products.
The end of the process, isn't it? Yeah.
And just getting an insight into all the different processes that went into making this tonic water.
It is different, isn't it, the whole business of making stuff and then selling it.
You can see how people would have felt really proud of what they had achieved as well, in terms of seeing it through from the very inception.
There's a sense in which the chemist and druggist is becoming a much more powerful force in some ways.
Through, on the one hand, being a hard-headed businessman and making their shops into profitable going concerns and on the other hand, saying, we're going to introduce chemical knowledge into the pharmacy.
To celebrate their first week in business, Barber and Goodman are holding an open evening, a chance to offer some of their new products to the public and catch up on how their customers are doing.
Some Worcester sauce? You only need a tiny bit, it's strong.
A couple of drops on your chips sort of sauce.
Those sorts of flavours.
It's that scrunched up face! THEY LAUGH There's something about it that just gets me.
I've really enjoyed this first experience of early Victorian medicine.
It's been such a combination of so many things from the past and new experiments into the future.
We've been launching off now into the new science and if anything, this experience has really whetted my appetite for the next finding out, the next, where did it go from here.
BOTTLE POPS There we go! Once the actual steam kettle got going and the actual herbs came through, there was that 10 minute spot when the smell of rosemary came in and it was beautiful.
Once it got going, it was really exciting for me.
I've still got the bruise, unfortunately.
Let's have a look.
It's gone shades of yellow.
It's changing, like they do.
I would say those remedies have had no effect whatsoever.
What you you think? I would tend to agree.
All they've been is a nuisance, to be honest.
The main issue is actually going to bed knowing that I've got worm on my arm and lying there, not wanting to get the duvet on the worm with that knowledge in mind.
It's greasy and I'm constantly aware that I'm getting it on my clothes.
It doesn't really soak in, soI can't see the appeal, to be honest.
It's not looking like a good remedy to sell in modern-day times? I can't see it making it onto the market today.
I have found this, seeing how the Victorians approached pharmacy, fascinating.
There's a spirit, adventure, an entrepreneurism there.
We're understanding the nature of the interaction between the medicine and the patients themselves.
Very, very nice.
In fact, I would swish it around a bit before I swallowed it.
You can use it as a gargle? Yes, and it helped get rid of the soreness that I had in my throat.
I can actually say, yes, it has helped a lot.
Has it eased your breathing? It's much better.
Before, as I breathed out, it was very crackly, it was very difficult, a typical asthmatic type feeling.
It has helped, I can feel as though I can breathe normally again, for the first time in more than three weeks.
Oh, lovely.
I'm dying to ask, how long did that plaster last? About three hours.
Well, that's more than I thought actually.
What was it like? Well, I've never had chamois leather next to my skin but it is quite comfortable but I didn't get any feeling of the Frankincense.
Right.
There didn't seem to be any essence coming out at all.
When it fell off, it went straight to the floor? Literally, it just peeled off and dropped at my feet.
So, let's have a toast.
Cheers, or perhaps we should say, good health! May you all come back as customers, often! SHE LAUGHS By the end of the 1840s, scientific advances were beginning to filter down to the high street pharmacist.
Old ideas of bloodletting and purging gave way to exciting new techniques and cures.
Pharmacists would spearhead a whole new range of consumer experiences.
Nipple shields.
Blood and stomach pills Next time on Victorian Pharmacy the medicine that was supposed to cure everything.
Soap powder acts as a laxative.
Yep, I'm willing to try everything.
The discovery of how to kill germs.
OK, look at that go.
Give me a shout if it gets too much or anything.
And more Victorian contraptions are unleashed on the public.
Look at that! She's almost doing that by herself!