New Orleans Pharmacy Museum

09/03/2026

Join Mamou Spirits at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Friday, September 25th from 5 to 7 p.m. for an evening of amaro cocktails, medicinal botanicals, museum exploration, and beautiful music. A brief lecture will be given about the history of amaro and the origins of Traiteur. Later in the evening, Pharmacy Museum docent Grace Kennedy will discuss her own research into the relationship between medicine and magic in New Orleans.

This event is free to the public. All adults 18+ are welcome.

RSVP:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/traiteur-amaro-aperitivo-hour-at-the-new-orleans-pharmacy-museum-tickets-1999400080463

Join us Friday, September 25, for Aperitivo Hour at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum: an evening of bitter spirits, botanical medicine, music and history.

We’ll be serving cocktails featuring Traiteur Amaro and giving a brief talk on the history of amaro and the origins of Traiteur. Grace Kennedy, beloved Pharmacy Museum tour guide, will follow with a presentation drawn from her research into the relationship between magic and medicine in New Orleans.

There will also be live music and a scavenger hunt through the museum.

5–7pm
514 Chartres Street
Free admission. Ages 18+.

New Orleans Pharmacy Museum

09/02/2026

It is September and the first Mostly Ghostly tour of the season is only one week away. Join Grace Kennedy for this journey through medicine, mysticism, and the macabre.

This tour is currently only offered on the last four Wednesdays of September: 9/9, 9/16, 9/23, & 9/30.

Don’t keep the spirits waiting, reserve your ticket while there is still time.

Tickets available through link in bio or by visiting www.pharmacymuseum.org.

09/02/2026

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum is excited to officially be a Culture Pass Partner with the New Orleans Public Library! Reserve your Culture Pass to visit the Pharmacy Museum this month before they're all gone!
https://nolalibrary.libcal.com/passes/PharmacyMuseum

09/01/2026

It’s time again for the Spirited Salon at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum.

It is THE ELEVENTH HOUR.

The three occupants of 514 Chartres Street, each residing in their own century, are experiencing a crisis of faith in the eleventh hour. Will they find something that renews their hope, and will they be able to pass it on to whatever, or whomever, comes next?

This event will sell out, so reserve your spot now:
https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/pharmacymuseum/items/755671/?full-items=yes&flow=1039548

October 22nd, 26th, & 28th.
6PM-8PM
$45 General Admission
$30 NOPM Members (members email [email protected] to book)

Each admission ticket includes an alcoholic or NA beverage from the bar.

08/20/2026

While pill-rollers allowed pharmacists to quickly roll out equally-sized pills for customers, the entire process still required the producer to create the clay-like “snake” in advance. Pharmacists would need to be careful to mix the substance evenly, and each pill would need to be either coated or left to dry. Occasionally these coatings would involve things like chocolate for taste or even gold/silver for style, but at their most basic a light dust of rice flour would have to be used to prevent the pills from sticking together in their bottles. Even with the aid of a roller, the process was still time-intensive and prevented accomplishing any true mass-production.

The next major innovation would be to remove the need to make the “snakes” in the first place. In December of 1843, William Brockedon presented a patent called “Shaping Pills, Lozenges, and Black Lead by Pressure in Dies” and showcased a method of compressing an all-powder mixture into a single tablet via a strong, manual hammer blow. Brockedon was not actually a pharmacist or even involved in medicine at all– he was an artist with a vision to compress the lead shavings from pencils back into a usable tool. However, he theorized that his method would be useful for medicines, and quickly after his method was adopted by many as a way to create very pure forms of medications without the need for fillers and gums. Because they did not require these additives, his method was particularly useful for military pharmaceutical production and could easily be stored and transported.

Brockedon’s method also allowed for the development of true industrial machines that could rapidly produce pills. One company in particular was instrumental in bringing this technology to the public: Burroughs Wellcome & Co. branded a specific tablet-making machine that produced tablets they called “tabloids.” The term was so popular that it began to be used to refer to anything “compressed” and designed for quick consumption. Newspapers adopted this terminology to refer to short-form works designed to be read quickly and the modern-day “tabloid” was born, and has survived well past the original usage of the term.
👩🏻‍💻: Kamryn Pigg

07/24/2026

While we use the word “pill” quite commonly in our every-day language, it wouldn’t be improper to say that true “pills” are rare in the modern world. The word pill, from Latin “pillula,” (little ball) describes only one type of medical preparation– that is, a solid mass made of liquids and pastes put together into a soft, clay-like mass that could then be divided into even segments. This process is delicate, as care must be taken to ensure powder and paste are properly mixed and that the consistency is sticky enough to hold together and maintain shape. It is due to this time-consuming and intricate process that most “pills” in the modern world are either powders that have been compressed under very high pressure (tablets), or small cases filled with a substance (capsules).
Before tablets and capsules became the standard, however, the pill reigned supreme for centuries. Pharmacists would make the “pill mass” by first rolling it into a long snake before carefully cutting it into even (or even-ish) pieces, each measured individually. By the 18th-19th century, figuring out a way to streamline this process was the subject of much intrigue.

This isn’t to say that experimentation with creating tools did not occur before the 18th century at the earliest. At least one artifact from Ancient Greece has a similar look to the “pill rollers” we know today. However, whatever this tool was for (medicinal or not), it certainly did not catch on.

It would not be until the 1750’s that a sophisticated pill-rolling machine would be invented, and even it was not mass-produced until the 1800s. Originally made of wood augmented with brass, these machines consisted of one “handle” portion and one board, each with an area of grooves along one edge. With this, one could load the snake of pill “dough” and rapidly rub the two surfaces together, creating many equally sized small pills with one motion. This made the rapid production of pills fast and efficient, but still did not replace the need for a pharmacist to make the dough: the innovations needed to do that would change the shape of medicine (literally) and push the true “pill” off of its pedestal.

👩🏻‍💻: Kamryn Pigg

07/17/2026

Without standards of potency or scale, for most of human history the most relied-on measuring tool was a good, educated guess. For Galen, who believed in the theory of the four humors, dosage depended equally on the potency of the cure but also the size of the illness: if the patient had a “cold” scorpion bite, they needed to be heated up with “hot” cures enough to balance them out. But how much should be given while also avoiding overheating? Although Galen will give some idea of what a dose ought to be (“not two small spoonfuls but two large spoonfuls in three cups of [room-temp] water”), his instructions could vary wildly – in this case, by the size of your spoons.

This is the standard of medical texts for most of history. In Ibn Sina’s canon and well into the Islamic Golden Age, there is some sense that dosage guidelines ought to exist – one dram, perhaps. Even then, other treatments are to be “the size of a small nut,” which would mean the apothecary hand-rolled a ball of the medicine into an approximate size measured by eye alone.

By the 1600s, individuals like Nicholas Culpeper (English, 1616-1654) gave a dose recommendation for almost all of their recommended treatments. However, one issue remained: all of these medicines depended on substances whose power would depend on many factors, and there was no systematic way to ensure that each pour or pill was formed in the same way. A dram is a dram (approximately 3.8 grams, at the time equal to 3 scruples, or 60 grains), but carefully measuring out and weighing such a small amount was both time-consuming and prone to error, especially when a patient may need many doses of the medicine for home use. The next innovation, therefore, was not to be in how the texts were written– but rather in creating a system of large-scale production.

👩🏻‍💻: Kamryn Pigg

07/10/2026

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” - The Third Defense, Paracelsus (written 1538, published 1564)

Dosages and the proper methods of figuring them out are a topic of great importance to modern medicine. While the “therapeutic index” is quite high for many medicines, meaning that you could take a lot of it before it would cause any substantial damage, modern medicine often makes use of things where that is not the case. Lithium, a mineral once found (by the claims of the manufacturers) in 7-up sodas, has a narrow therapeutic index: the dose needed to treat someone with lithium is very close to the dosage that could potentially harm. To combat this, individuals on lithium have regular blood work to figure out just what their body is taking in, and if they are taking too much or too little.

While modern medicine is typically very careful about dosages, especially with drugs possessing small therapeutic indexes, this has historically not been the case at all: dosages were eyeballed for much of history, if they were measured at all (anyone could drink any amount of the ‘Lithiated Lemon’ drink that was 7-up). During the next few weeks, we will delve into how we’ve gone from saying “that’s about right” when making pills by eye and hand to exploring early experiments with pill-rollers, cachets, and other dosing-tools. Finally, we will enter the modern world of precision dosages.

👩🏻‍💻: Kamryn Pigg

07/09/2026

What a night! ✨

Last Thursday, we were thrilled to take part in French Quarter Museum Night, presented by the French Quarter Museum Association French Quarter Museums Assoc. alongside 10 other incredible museums celebrating the rich history and culture of the French Quarter.

At the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, guests enjoyed a beautiful courtyard performance by Alexis and the Sanity Alexis & the Sanity whose music created the perfect soundtrack for an unforgettable evening. We were also proud to debut our newest exhibition, Licensed to Practice: Louis Dufilho Jr. and the Making of American Medicine in New Orleans, exploring the story of America’s first licensed pharmacist and the history of medical licensure in Louisiana.

Thank you to everyone who visited, explored, listened, learned, and celebrated with us. Events like these remind us that museums, local artists, and cultural institutions thrive because of community support.

If you couldn’t make it, our new exhibition is now open—we hope to welcome you soon!

07/02/2026

“The use of powder [....] creates an abstract unity in the texture and color of the skin, which [...]immediately approximates the human being to the statue, that is, to something superior and divine.” - Charles Baudelaire, “In Praise of Cosmetics,” 1863

Cosmetics are ancient in their usage – body paint is quite literally prehistoric, and kohl was used commonly in Ancient Egypt, both for cosmetic purposes and – it is theorized – for medicinal ones. Even in Ancient Egypt, the cosmetics industry was more than just local products: early chemists would have had to synthesize them, as the compounds found in Ancient Egyptian kohl products are not naturally found around Egypt.

The intertwined relationship of makeup and pharmacy is, of all of the many different tasks pharmacies have historically had, perhaps the one that is most commonly observed today. Drug-store cosmetics are often one’s first introduction to beauty products. Similar to perfumery, the complex chemistry involved in cosmetics production has historically meant that the pharmacist would easily be the most well-equipped person to be producing beauty products in any given neighborhood.

In the 18th century, this relationship was one of discretion as well as practicality – after all, makeup was considered to be a reflection of poor moral character. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t widely used, but that it was a poorly kept secret. According to “The Ugly-Girl Papers,” published in the late 19th century originally in Harper’s Bazar, “we reconcile ourselves to the pearly falsehood [of powder]. Everybody knows they are inventions.” To go to the pharmacy and buy chalk and glycerin would not be seen as an indiscretion in the same way that the purchase of a boxed powder may be. When Baudelaire wrote “In Praise of Cosmetics” in 1863, the work was considered a very subversive piece due to his insistence that women’s cosmetics rise to the level of high art and thus should not be shameful at all! However, for the average 19th century woman, this “art” would remain a discreet transaction between herself and the pharmacist.

👩🏻‍💻: Kamryn Pigg