Pictures from the Past of the Healing Arts / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 18-19. (Budapest, 2000)
The Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum in Buda Castle
The Alchemist, which dcpicts the 'learned experimenter' and his watching wife with the genuine fine humour of Dutch genre-painting. Important old books were placed into the show-case in the front of the alchemist's workshop: the first known alchemist's, Geber's Alchimia (Nürnberg, 1541); Operum Medicorum which includes a chapter by Franciscus Joel physician-apothecary of Hungarian origin, on the 'making of potable gold' (Rostock, 1629); and one of the works of the father of iatro-chcmistry, Paracelsus (Strassburg, 1603). The first medical-pharmaceutical book in Hungarian, Péter Méliusz Juhász's Herbárium (first edition, Kolozsvár, 1578) was placcđ here, too, together with its sourccs, the Krauterbuchs' of Dioscurides, L¤ñiçerųs and Ma ĥi¤lųs (this latter on the large open shell). There can be seen in addition some minerals, herbs, and preparations from the Paracelsian formulary, the later very popular cantharis included. In the next room to the interior there stands in the corner a red copper distiling eqyuipment and there hangs the unknown German master's work The Alchemist, painted on wood. On the large-sized oak-wood fittings and beside there are the instruments used in the actions that precede and succccd distillation: mortars of stone, wood and bronze for contusion; mortars of serpentine for porfirisation; drug cuttcr for concision; the tincture presser from the St. Bernard pharmacy at Zirc and the waffle-iron. From among the instruments for making different drug forms we may mention the pillmaker 'Signcttc' from the 18th century and the different spoons for cooking plaster. A precious relic is the 2000-year-old mummy's head of which the famous mummy powder was made. The eighteenth-century mummy-powder box from the 'King' pharmacy Nagyszeben (Sibiu, Romania) gives evidence of its contemporary use (in cases of bleeding, coughs, fevers, falling sickncss). Attention is caught by Stefano A. Ghirardini's (1696-1756) large picture of 1723, the Apothecary Nun, which depicts, as a symbol of pharmacy, a standing Dominican nun surrounded with apothecary jars and instruments. In the last room of the exhibition, beside the signatures and wrought iron door hinges left from the 'Golden Eagle' pharmacy, there arc displayed some relics from apothecary's shops of Buda and Pest, like the serpent badge of the 'Serpent' pharmacy founded in 1784 (Italian work, 17th c.). The three-quarter length portrait-á-dcux Károly Hand el apothecary and his wife painted by a North-Hungarian master in 1784 has a typically provincial air. Right at the courtyard exit a marble memory of the apothecaries who took part in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848, by the Pharmacy Unit of the Craftsmen's National Association in 1948. 86
