The apothecary laboratory of the History of Pharmacy Collection in Cluj-Napoca is reconstructed in the basement and
can be accessed, though not quite easily, in the corner of the
Materials’ Room. Mind the steps – they are cut-out, asymmetrical, and
very steep. Though the basement is the oldest part of the building, the so-called Maucksch-Hintz House, with
Renaissance door frames and even reused Roman epigraphic monuments, one
cannot be certain that it was ever used as a laboratory or just as a
storage space. Its main problem is not the access, uncertain during the
day as the current steps were installed in the 1970s, but the evacuation
of smoke (an inevitable result of using the stove for various
apothecary procedures) and the problematic ventilation of the basement.
What is more, when the pharmacy was nationalized, the lab was already
located on the first floor, in today's Books' Room.
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| Mind the steps! |
Two rooms are reconstructed downstairs, one just for storage and one
for the actual preparation of medicines. The latter contains the
reconstruction of an apothecary stove and various original tools and
utensils from old pharmacies in Transylvania: an alembic, a retort,
several glass tubes and crucibles, types inherited from alchemy,
percolators, graded cups, mortars, three-legged pots and many other
items. Before the chemical synthesizing of the ingredients, the
preparation of drugs involved relatively simple procedures such as the
crushing, boiling, distillation, maceration and percolation of various
plants, minerals and substances of animal origin.
Listen to this presentation free online on izi.Travel HERE.
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| Reconstructed apothecary laboratory in Cluj-Napoca |
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