Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [14]
With one significant exception, the other ingredients an apothecary required were not so hard to find. Animal products could be had from butchers or specialist traveling salesmen. Pharmacists usually obtained the plants themselves, cultivating physic gardens or wandering the countryside in search of rare roots. The most important thing was that ingredients were fresh; almost every paste and potion had to be specially prepared on the day it was required, and the principal tool of the apothecary’s trade was his mortar and pestle.
The one drug no apothecary prepared on his own behalf was theriac,*5 the main antidote to venoms of all sorts. It was used to treat snakebite and rabies and taken as a cure for poison, though it was most commonly prescribed to strengthen a patient who had been bled, sweated, and purged and whose condition was, nevertheless, deteriorating. Theriacs—there were several of them in existence—were particularly complex and potent medicines, and so difficult to make that only the senior apothecaries of the largest cities were trusted to prepare them. They contained up to 70 different ingredients and were unusual in that their single most important constituent was animal: viper’s flesh. The best theriac came from Venice and was known as “Venice treacle.” Venetian pharmacists bred their own vipers and mixed their theriac in bulk once each year. The concoction was exported by the Italian city-state throughout the rest of Europe, and no apothecary of the time would have been without it.
Nevertheless, medicines were not a Dutch apothecary’s sole source of income. They were members of the St. Nicholas Guild, which included the grocers and spicers, and like them they had the right to sell fruit pies and ginger cakes. Many of the less reputable stocked beer, sometimes dispensing it surreptitiously and free of the heavy state taxes on alcohol. All of them made poisons, based on arsenic, which were used to control the extraordinary quantities of vermin that infested every town. This part of a pharmacist’s work was strictly controlled by the local council, but, even so, it helped to give them a somewhat sinister reputation. When someone in a town died unexpectedly, there were often mutterings of potions brewed in dark back rooms. In their cluttered stores, the black-cloaked apothecaries merely smiled.
Jeronimus Cornelisz set up shop in Haarlem, probably some time between 1624 and 1627. His reasons for settling in the province of Holland, rather than Friesland, remain unknown, but Haarlem was a much bigger and more cosmopolitan place than Bergum or Leeuwarden. It was the second city of the wealthiest and most important of the United Provinces and had a population of 40,000. It must have seemed a propitious place to establish a new business.
Haarlem was a typical Dutch town, raucous and bustling, but neat and tidy to a fault. It had sprung up a few miles inland from the coast, a little to the west of Amsterdam and just north of the dark and storm-swept inland sea known as the Haarlemmermeer. The whole city was girdled by a moat and a defensive wall, and the lazy waters of the River Spaarne, which flowed through Haarlem on its way to the sea, cut it into two unequal halves and brought in the ships that supplied many of its needs. Inside the walls the red-roofed houses were mostly made of brick, and all the major streets had been paved by the first years of the century. They were daily cleaned of rubbish and the ordure that still rained down from upstairs windows—a refinement quite unheard-of outside the Netherlands. All in all, Haarlem was a pleasant, busy place, less haphazard, less chaotic, and less dangerous than the great towns of England, Italy, and