Pharmaceutical education is, first and foremost, a technological education, based mostly on a laboratory component. However, pharmacists do not exert their profession isolated but inserted into a global and changing society and in a permanent relationship with the public and other professionals. The role of humanist training in science education is to provide conceptual tools for understanding that general context, beyond technical knowledge. Whether they work in small units, in permanent and intimate contact with the public, or in larger institutional or business contexts, with a more distant relationship to society, healthcare professionals have always a practice that combines the technical dimension with a relevant humanistic component.

The contents of education can often be seen from these two distinct cultural views, the sciences and the humanities. The history of pharmacy and therapy synthesizes these two visions, constantly seeking an unifying approach to scientific knowledge and their relationship to human societies. That is done in a global framework, including social, economic, political and religious dimensions, combining them with the evolution of therapeutic beliefs, and seeking to look simultaneously at the general and the particular, in a context of change in short and long-term duration.

While there are other previous texts, we may consider that the birth of pharmaceutical historiography took place in the 19th century, with the emergence, soon after 1800, of various historical introductions into German pharmaceutical textbooks. Early works devoted to the history of pharmacy were the Ensayo sobre la historia de la farmacia (Madrid, 1847) by Carlos Mallaina and Quentin Chiarlone, and the Histoire des apothicaires chez les principaux peuples du monde (Paris, 1853) by Adrien Phillippe (1801-1858). The history of pharmacy began to gain an institutional and academic recognition in Germany in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, mainly with the work of Julius Berendes (1837-1914), Hermann Peters (1847-1920) and Hermann Schelenz (1848-1922).

In all this chronology it is possible to glimpse the first large period of social and technical assertion of pharmacists in mainland Europe, that of professional status based in a higher and university education, leaving behind manual craft status in which knowledge was individually transmitted by a pharmacist master.

The development of the history of pharmacy has been essentially based on the work done on three axes: institutions of higher education, scientific societies, and museums. The inclusion of the history of pharmacy in pharmaceutical higher education programs is now widespread, both as independent courses or in courses that include other subjects of intersection of the pharmaceutical sciences with humanities and social sciences. The first country to include it in the pharmaceutical curriculum was Spain in the mid-nineteenth century. Post-graduate studies, including PhDs, on pharmacy history, are currently held in several countries, both in Europe and the US. The first society dedicated to the history of pharmacy, the Société d’Histoire de la Pharmacie, emerged in 1913 in France, followed by several other national and international societies.

Central in the disciplinary development of the history of pharmacy is the definition of its object of study. This has implications in a number of other subjects, such as the definition of the history of pharmacy boundaries and its relationship to nearby disciplines. The first attempt to clearly define the nature and boundaries of the history of pharmacy was due in 1927 to German pharmacist George Urdang (1882-1960). This author emigrated to the US during the Nazi regime and he deeply influenced European and US pharmaceutical historiography in the mid-20th century. He sought to demarcate borders to the history of pharmacy, considering pharmacists and pharmacist practice as being the subject of this discipline. This perspective led to the exclusion of a large number of aspects of the history of the pharmaceutical sciences, which would be referred to the scope of the history of chemistry, botany, biology, etc. This perspective went into collision with contemporary trends of history, namely of the historiographical movement of the Annales School¹, of practicing a global history, limiting the study of the history of pharmacy to a narrow point of view.

To correctly identify the subject of the discipline, we have to remember that the term pharmacy (from Greek phármakon, remedy and venom) simultaneously serves to denominate both a profession and a technical and scientific area. As a profession, pharmacy finds its definition in different activities related to the preparation and dispensing of medicinal drugs. As a technical and scientific area is the product of the intersection of various disciplines such as biology, chemistry and medicine, centered on the relationship between drugs and living organisms. In this way, whatever the point of view where we look at the term pharmacy, what we find at the core of its meaning are the medicines. Thus, we have to conclude that the object of the history of pharmacy is not the pharmaceutical profession, but the medicinal drugs. It is not about studying medicines in abstract, but of studying medicines in a number of different relationships with human societies. Paraphrasing Marc Bloch (1886-1944), we will say that the history of pharmacy is the discipline studying the human-drugs relationship over the ages. This relationship constitutes its object and defines its domain. In this conceptual framework, the pharmaceutical profession remains as important as before, but we have to direct equal attention to the knowledge of the aspects of the history of drugs that were not directly connected with pharmacists. In this history of pharmacy we study all aspects of the conceptual creation, production, and distribution of medicines (pharmacy), but also those of their use (therapeutics).

Once the subject of the discipline has been defined, let us see the questions that may be formulated in the framework of your study. We can mostly distinguish two large groups of questions. The first includes all the transformations suffered by the scientific theories and concepts related to the preparation of medicines or to their use. The second includes the transformations occurring in the drug–society relationship. These levels thus correspond to two ways to look at the history of pharmacy, one connected predominantly to the history of the sciences and the other to economic and social history. The main task of pharmaceutical historiography turns out to be the quest for synthesis between these two perspectives. Each one has specific research methods, but only its joint, integrated use allows for a global understanding of the place of medicinal drugs in human history.

1. Movement constituted around the journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale, founded by Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) and Marc Bloch (1886-1944) in 1929.[↩]