Among the fabulous exhibits of the History of Pharmacy Collection I discovered three engraving plates for apothecary labels. Used in the nineteenth century, they are a collage of various such labels, with decorated cartouches, symbols of pharmacy, inscriptions with the name of the pharmacy they were used in (for commercial purposes, naturally) and sometimes the initials of the pharmacists themselves. The plates have been recently used to create new prints, thus revealing the details. Such labels were then cut out of the common sheet, filled in by hand with the details of the respective products, and used individually either to wrap a small number of pills or other types of solid medicine or they were glued to wooden boxes that contained larger quantities of cures.
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| Detail of one of the plates, with a cartouche inscribed "Apotheke der Kaiserlicher Adler" (the Imperial Eagle Apothecary) - in reference to the double-headed eagle of the Austro/Hungarian monarchy |
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| Detail of a plate with the depiction of the imperial eagle and of pharmaceutical implements. |
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