Luxury Medicine

If you stepped into the back room of Johann Peter Paul Peer’s pharmacy in Brixen/Bressanone back in the 18th century, you may have been greeted by the curious sight of him carefully separating sheets of gold leaf. Look more closely and you would have seen the ingredients for his precious remedies lined up neatly on the worktop: gold and silver leaf sitting alongside the small pills he had already rolled together. His preparations complete, Johann Peer – who acquired the pharmacy in 1787 –would use the gold leaf to line a spherical container made from dark green serpentine stone and put the pills inside, first one, then another, and another. He would then close the container and rotate it around and around until the pills were evenly coated in the gold leaf.

Pills coated in a precious metal were all the rage among Brixen’s upper class in the mid-18th century and are a brilliant example of how medicine varied between the rich and poor. There was no medical reason for using gold. More likely, the pills were simply a means for rich families and high-up members of the church in the diocesan town of Brixen to show off their wealth. While the clergy stocked up on medicine from the prince-bishops’ court pharmacy, everyone else visited Johann Peer’s town pharmacy, which still ex ists as the Peer pharmacy today.

The pretentious patients who bought the gold pills had no idea that gold doesn’t dissolve in stomach acid. This meant that the active ingredient inside their pricey pills – say, a laxa tive or medicine for heart complaints – never actually had the desired effect. Instead, it simply passed through the patient’s body and landed in their chamber pot together with the precious metal.

To make matters worse for these discerning customers, some of the useless gold pills were even fake, as recent anal yses have shown that a number of them weren’t coated in gold at all… but in humble brass.

Brixen Pharmacy Museum

+ Looking back at 400 years of the history of healing from Paracelsus to today, this fascinating museum is situated above the modern-day Peer Apotheke in a historic building that has served as a pharmacy since 1602. It houses the extensive collection of apothecary jars, herbal medicine books, medical equipment and exotic remedies accumulated by the Peer family over generations and also provides entertaining glimpses behind the scenes of everyday life in Brixen.

+ The museum’s cabinet of curiosities even contains part of a real Egyptian mummy in the form of the legendary mumia vera drug, which is a powder made from ground mummies.

pharmaziemuseum.it