The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [26]
John Sawyer, the doctor to whom he was “indentured,” was a surgeon and an apothecary and something of a holdover from earlier times. Along with his medical practice, he ran an apothecary—excuse me, a dispensary, as retail drugstores were now called. While a patient would typically get a written prescription from his apothecary and take it elsewhere to be filled, Dr. Sawyer still offered the traditional one-stop shopping. If you happened to step into his shop at 101 Park Street, you might have found his apothecary apprentice behind the counter. H. V. Carter occasionally filled in as the dispensary’s dispenser, the person who counted pills and filled prescriptions for laudanum and tincture of belladonna and black draught and so on. Not that he liked it. “Am determined to have as little as possible to do with shop and prescriptions,” he once wrote, “which [I] consider as altogether foreign to duty and [a] source of much annoyance.” There was, however, one order he always filled without complaint: his mother’s.
An apothecary in an apothecary, c. mid-nineteenth century
Eliza Carter is a mysterious figure in her son’s diary. She never comes in person to the dispensary and, in fact, has never even visited H.V. in London. She is apparently too ill to leave Scarborough, though what’s wrong with her and what drug she needs are not yet spelled out. She exists on the page only as M. “More pills for M.,” Carter might jot, meaning he had received a letter from her with a request for medication. In response, he does something that is almost impossible for me to imagine a pharmacy student today doing: he makes the pills himself.
How? He doesn’t say. But then, for good or bad, a diarist is beholden only to his own inner narrative. He does not need to explain such things to himself.
Thankfully, the details of nineteenth-century pharmacology are well documented. Pills began as a paste. The dutiful son would have carefully measured his medicinal ingredients, ground them with mortar and pestle to a fine powder, and added a liquid binding agent. Then he would mix. The importance of thorough mixing could not be overstated because each small pill had to have the same potency when the process was completed. Next came the “pill machine,” a simple, hinged apparatus that operated like a waffle iron, albeit without the waffle pattern or the heat. The machine pressed and molded the paste into neat rows of pencil-thin pipes. Finally, perhaps after some hardening had occurred, Carter would use a separate instrument to cut the pipes into their proper lengths, thus creating identical-sized pills. These had to dry before he could package them.
To think about each step Carter took is to be reminded that Rx, the symbol for prescription, is a Latin abbreviation for recipe, a word that, to me, always conjures up home-cooked meals and a mother’s love. There is something so poignant about the role reversal at play here, the child being a provider of sorts. No doubt, it gave the young Carter great pride to help his mother, even though he was far from home. Whenever he mentions the pill making, he comes across as efficient and capable—professional. Even so, the intensely personal nature of the task could not have been far from his mind.