Chemist’s Shop Still A Place of Mysteries.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18889, 12 October 1929, Page 19 (Supplement)

Chemist’s Shop Still A Place of Mysteries.

Philtres and Potions Have Given Way

To Cosmetics.

Written for the “Star" by A. H. CARRINGTON.

ONCE upon a time the chemist was a mysterious being supposed to be in league with all sorts of unearthly powers. His shop was a cave of mystery with stuffed animals and quaint-shaped retorts; his business consisted in dispensing love potions and philtres—and perhaps a few curses on the sly. Now. however, it is all so different. Not bo long ago the chemist’s establishment could be distinguished by the huge globes of coloured liquids, cunningly displayed and lighted in the front window; but nowadays the love philtres and even the coloured globes have changed to fanciful advertisements for cosmetics, dentifrices and tabloids

The net result is probably the same. It used to be an adventure to go into the chemist’s demesne. Queer stuffed animals, black cats, abracadabras, and glass vessels with mysterious liquids bubbling and fuming on a charcoal brazier, were his stock in trade. Philosophers* stones, incantations and threats of being burnt as a witch terrified the bravest. To-dav, a chemist’s 6hop is all advertisements of rows of pearly teeth, and a trio behind the scenes is dreadfully dull—nothing but rows and rows of bottles. On closer inspection, however, the air of mvsterv is revived. There are white powders in blue * bottles, and brown powders in white bottles; colourless liquids ooze through corks, apparently, and coat the necks of their containers with white crustations, and they all have the weirdest names.

Troch: Zingib for instance, is painted largely on a huge glass-stoppered iar; on another shelf there is Oxvmel B.P reminiscent of the Bov Scouts. Pulv. Minus Fulvus. and many others. Onlv the chemist knows what it all means, just as he and the doctor are the only people who can translate the hieroglyphics of a prescription. Then there’s the way a prescription is mixed up. The

measuring and the weighing, the shaking and the pounding in a mortar, and finally the bottling and the labelling. Worst of all, drinking the beastly stuff. But it does seem to cure. Herodotus was right when he wrote . about the Indians: Whosoever among ffie Indians becomes sick goes out into the desert and lays himself down there. No one troubles himself about him, whether he be sick or dead. That sounds much simpler. The Chinese Pharmacology was probably the most interesting. Their remedies were culled copiously from the animal and vegetable world and included such items as elephant’s bile, dried spiders, bugs, toads, lizards, snakes, claws, ears, tongues, hearts, and livers of numerous animals, dragon bones, and innumerable other things. If the patient died, according to the Chinese idea, he had certainly been cured, but the physician had not had time to rid him of the poisonous drug that had been used to kill the morbid influence that had caused the illness. In China, too, the art of feeling the pulse was one of the most important rituals, and was extremely elaborate. It was performed elegantly by placing several fingers upon a certain point and then raising or depressing each in turn, as is done in playing the piano. In this practice the changes of the moon and the seasons of the year were also considered. In diseases of the heart the left pulse was investigated, and in diseases of the liver, the right. It must have been very awkward to catch influenza at the wrong season of the moon, and it is gratifying to know that those practices are not absolutely universal. As a man said the other day: “Well, how are you to-day? Able to sit up and take a little nourishment? ”

“ Yes, thank you. A nice diet of aspirin and quinine.’* Well that seems to be the state of things now, but the things that some people admire most about the chemists are the rows of pearly teeth that the bathing girls display.