| Description | Wooden material medica chest, with lockable double doors. Interior comprises four drawers, shallower at the top and deeper at the bottom. A brass plate on the top of the chest is inscribed Cysta Medicamentorum. Collegii Medicorum Dublin AD 1736 (Medicine Chest. College of Physicians Dublin AD 1736).
Drawers contain glass bottles housing animal, vegetable and mineral specimens used as materia medica, the drawers and some of the bottles are numbered, although no key survives. Some of the bottles may be contemporary to the chest, others are later additions as they are marked with the label of William Allen, a pharmacist on Henry Street, Dublin, who operated in the mid-nineteenth century.
Materia medica is a Latin term for the study of medical preparations, their sources and uses. It also refers to the ingredients ground up and used to make these treatments. |
| History | One of four chests commission by the College in 1736 in response to the 1735 Act 'for preventing frauds and abuses in the making and vending unsound, adulterated, and bad drugs and medicines’, under this Act the College were given the power to compile a register of all apothecary shops within Dublin and a seven mile radius of the city, and appoint four Fellows to inspect the shops, seize any unsound drugs and fine any unregistered apothecaries. A list of approved medicines was complied in 1736, and in July of that year the College resolved 'the specimens of medicines to be kept in the four chests be made up according to the list'. Although the purpose of the chests is not mentioned, it seems likely they were created for the four Fellows who were appointed to inspect the apothecary shops. |
| Custodial History | In 1846 Dr Robert Shekleton presented this chest 'formerly belonging to the College of Physicians, and now after an absence, of probably fifty years to its original owners’. He had been given the chest 30 years earlier by a friend, Mr Hallam, who had purchased it at auction some time before. Shekleton originally lent the chest to a friend who used it to house his coin collection, having given the friend a more suitable cabinet for his collection, Shekleton presented the chest back to its original owners 'with it will be found some of the original bottles and boxes, the latter containing the specimens of medicines that were in them when it came into Mr Hallam's possession, and which in some degree may enhance the value of it'.
Details from Letter from Robert Shekleton to Robert Collins, Treasurer 8 May 1846 in Letter Book Vol. V, RCPI/2/3/1/5. |