Victorian Pharmacy (2010) s01e04 Episode Script
Part 4
Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire revives the sights, sounds and smells of the 19th Century.
Morning.
At its heart stands the pharmacy - a treasure house of potions and remedies from a century and a half ago.
Now, in a unique experiment, historian Ruth Goodman, Professor of Pharmacy Nick Barber and PhD student Tom Quick have opened the doors to the Victorian pharmacy, recreating a High Street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea.
They've brought the pharmacy to life, sourcing ingredients, mixing potions and dispensing cures.
But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic and cold medicines were based on opium, the team are being highly selective.
They're only trying out safe versions of traditional remedies on carefully selected customers.
The start was like the Wild West - people didn't know what was good and bad.
Try to get a bit of speed up.
Oh, there we go! The pharmacy was something that affected everybody's lives in one way or another.
They're discovering an age of social change that brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time, heralding a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern High Street chemist as we know it today.
Having followed the evolution of the pharmacy through 50 remarkable years, Barber & Goodman's High Street shop is approaching the end of the 19th century - a period when pharmacies were responding to a fast-changing world of fresh opportunities.
And women, too, were entering a new age.
Now we're sort of coming towards the end of this journey through the 19th Century pharmacy, I really ought to have some clothes that are a bit more appropriate.
At the end of the century, women in business - and, of course, women WERE in business - were wanting to emphasise that sort of quality.
So they started dressing in a much more man-like way, to emphasise their sort of business credentials as such.
So you get women's suits, for those who wanted to show that they were in the world of work, holding their own professionally alongside the blokes.
Do you know? I think I could run the world of pharmacy dressed like this.
The pharmacy has now moved into a new era of scientific understanding.
Old ideas of what caused disease and how to treat it have faded away, and the foundations of modern medicine are firmly in place.
While other retailers had stayed fixed on their core business, pharmacies had seized every opportunity to expand their goods and services.
No longer just a provider of drugs and remedies, the Victorian pharmacy now sold a wide range of products which wouldn't look out of place in today's chemist shops.
This is what the whole of the 19th Century, in a sense, ends up as, isn't it? It's a culmination.
It comes up to this, doesn't it? And all of a sudden we have this scientific knowledge.
The pharmacist has the expertise.
We're stocking branded products, probably for the first time.
We're not making them ourselves any more.
Pharmacists are starting to look like Well, department stores.
An enterprising pharmacist used his chemical expertise and the materials he already had on his shelves to cater for one of the great growing fashions of the age.
Right.
That's ready.
Could you give me the slide? Photographer Terry King has come to demonstrate the latest technology.
Photography was invented in the very early years of Victoria's reign, but it wasn't until the 1880s that the real boom began.
Easier-to-use equipment gave amateur photography popular appeal as a hobby.
And that meant big profits for pharmacies who could supply the chemicals, process pictures and sell cameras.
I'll just check once more that we've got the focus right.
Slide out.
We're all ready.
Watch the birdie.
Keep still while we do it.
Thank you very much.
We're done now.
Later, after Terry has set up a darkroom, Tom will be learning how to develop the photograph.
It's early spring, and in the fields around Barber & Goodman's Shropshire pharmacy, many medicinal plants are beginning to emerge.
Nick and herbalist Eleanor Gallia are on the hunt for one of the most effective traditional painkillers.
So, what's this plant we're seeking? Meadowsweet.
Filipendula ulmaria.
Beautiful name! I could marry someone called that.
And what was it used for? Digestive, calming digestive.
Very popular in rheumatism.
Pain relief.
Diaphoretic, so used to help sweat out the early stages of a fever.
I keep thinking I see little bits of it.
It's very small at the moment.
There's some here, actually.
More of it here.
So, the effects depend partly on the time of the year when it's picked, and obviously the parts of the plant which are picked? Was that something which herbalists and chemists and druggists would have paid attention to? Hugely.
Very, very important.
Especially so when, traditionally, herbalists were collecting their own herbs, then dispensing their own herbs and making up tinctures and medicines.
So, shall we pick some meadowsweet then? Yes, let's.
Remembering all the time that this is just the very young growth.
So this would help from diaphoresis, the sweating of an early fever.
But really, the main action, the anti-acid action, which is It's got a lovely soothing action on the inside of the stomach.
It helps the mucosa, the alkali which protects the gut from the acid that's produced in the whole digestive process.
We can make an infusion out of it, make it like a tea? Yes.
The key of making an infusion is always to make it in a warmed pot.
Mm-hm.
With a lid.
Really? Yes, very important.
That way, you preserve any of the volatile oils.
Oh, right.
Volatile coming from "volar" - "to fly".
Really? The little oils, they're all longing to fly away.
You give them hot water and off they go, so you have to quickly catch them with a lid.
Ruth has collected the raw ingredients for a product that would quickly become a popular "under the counter" product.
What I'm actually making here are condoms.
This is sheep's intestine.
Of course, it's the small intestine, not the large intestine! I can't say that this is the pleasantest of jobs.
It's pretty smelly, pretty dirty.
So, having pulled it apart from the rest of the stomach contents, I'm just squeezing it so that everything inside comes out.
I mean, this is the intestinal tract, so it's sort of partly digested grass, basically.
Oh, I've ruptured it, at the side.
I'm not actually expecting anybody to actually wear this.
So I could sort of think, "Oh well, it doesn't matter.
" But I sort of want to get it right.
I quite like the whole experimental thing.
I want to make one that works.
So I've got quite a number of processes to go through before this is a finished product.
It's got to soak for a bit, then I've got to turn the whole thing inside out, so I can make sure the inside is thoroughly cleaned.
And it's then got to be macerated - lightly worked and soaked - in an alkali substance, to sterilise it.
Then I've got to dry it out over brimstone, sulphur fumes.
Again, we're trying to sterilise the whole thing.
And then I can start shaping it.
So, alkali overnight, change the alkali in the morning.
Condoms in one form or another had been available for centuries.
Whether they were made of sheep gut or, after the vulcanisation of rubber, made of rubber.
They had never had any effect whatsoever on the birth rate.
They had been used almost exclusively to protect men from sexual disease, when they were busily playing around.
Keen to exploit every business opportunity in the 1890s, pharmacies began offering another new service to their customers.
With only one qualified dentist for every 8,500 people, there was money to be made from tooth pulling.
Retired dentist and dental historian Professor Stanley Gelbier has come to train Tom up.
What I don't understand, Stanley, is, as a pharmacist's assistant, why would I be extracting teeth? That's quite simple, really, cos you're going to be one of a number of people who were extracting teeth at that particular time of the century.
In London, many of them were surgeons who also did dentistry almost as a sideline.
As you got outside London, you had a variety of other people.
You had blacksmiths.
They could make the tools in their forge, and then they would actually use them.
Some were a wig makers, silversmiths, a whole load of different people.
It must have been quite a market for it? What state were Victorian people's teeth in at this time? A lot of people had bad teeth.
The problem was sugar, as always.
Their mouths were often full of bad teeth.
They had pus straining into their mouth through gum boils et cetera, so it was quite horrific and quite smelly.
But the thing is, dentistry was horrific at that time, so people didn't rush to get their teeth treated until it was absolutely essential.
Right, so shall we just have a go, and see how I go about this, then? So what would I be using here? Why don't we try out one of the keys? The brutally efficient dental key was the weapon of choice for extracting diseased teeth.
Some earlier ones wouldn't have had a handle - just a straight piece of metal.
This was more sophisticated, more comfortable - you get a better grip.
Why don't we try it out on your finger first? Er, OK.
There we are.
It won't take your finger off.
I am just hooking it over.
We can see that now.
As I slowly turn, feel the grip.
Very tight.
So we won't do any more.
You have a try.
Try it on this.
I need to go round the back here then.
You can't do that because that will be the back of the head, the throat.
You need to go in through the mouth.
Get that gripping on the tooth.
Then, when you grip, quick yank.
That's it - it's gone.
Wow.
You can see how that would do quite a lot of damage.
That's right.
More often than not, not only the tooth comes out.
Sometimes the tooth breaks, sometimes it comes straight out.
Often you damage the gum around the tooth and the bone around the tooth, but it was really horrific.
Remember, this is a day when they had no anaesthetics.
It really was painful.
That's not a friendly technology for your mouth.
No, no.
Not at all.
To avoid the terror of tooth pulling, wealthier customers might lavish some care on their teeth with a tooth powder, or dentifrice, specially prepared by their pharmacist.
What I've been doing is grinding up some myrrh and we're going to use it to make a dentifrice, which is what they used before they used toothpaste.
It is a powder and a mixture of various things, which I am going to be bringing together.
At this stage, they didn't use toothpaste because of a practical reason, which is, in particular, they couldn't get tubes, which we're so used to now.
It was only went soft metal tubes were made available in about the 1890s that they could put toothpaste into these tubes and be able to have them sealed and used in a way which we are so used to now.
First thing I'm going to do is mix some chalk together with some peppermint oil.
Some of the orris root.
This is a plant substance.
We've got some lumps in here because of the mixture of the oil and the chalk - sort of binds it together and makes a bit it lumpy.
We'll try and get rid of those, but we will be sieving it before we give it out - before we produce it as the final product.
Pharmacists would sometimes add ground cuttlefish, brick dust, and even crushed china, to their toothpowders for extra abrasive effect.
We've got some soap flakes coming in as well.
Soap was used, as you can imagine .
.
to clean the teeth.
The art of mixing is extremely important.
It is no use having a dilution of something if you end up with a concentrated part of it which is poisonous or dangerous in some ways.
I am worried that will be given to someone.
I'll be rubbing some on my own gums before I'm giving it to anyone else.
That sense of responsibility was there all the time.
That whole concept of checking is so important in pharmacy, because you only have to make the careless error we all make in aspects of our life and you can severely harm someone.
We are getting close to being ready to try it.
We'll try sieving down a small amount.
That's looking good.
Hello, Helen.
How are you? This is what I'll be testing then? It is indeed.
Very kind of you to volunteer to try this.
Helen Wright is a researcher of dental diseases, and the perfect customer to assess the quality and appeal of Nick's concoction.
It would be presented in one of these little pots and they'd have a toothbrush.
I've got a lovely selection of toothbrushes here.
Are you ready to give this a go? Yep.
Pick a toothbrush.
This one here - it's nice and small.
Give it a try - see how much sticks on.
I have to say Yeah, it seems to stick well to the toothbrush.
Good.
Here we go.
Let me give it a try as well.
Put some on my finger.
You're still standing - that's a good start.
What's it like? It's got a definite zing to it, hasn't it? I can feel the inside of my lips and gums tingling.
It's a real That'll be the myrrh doing that.
I'm just waiting to see if there's a secondary kick.
You can smell the peppermint.
You can't taste it too much, though.
You can feel it's gritty on your teeth.
I certainly can with my finger.
They feel nice and clean using a brush though.
Might have a product here.
I've got a pot here for you to take away.
And a toothbrush as well.
Thank you.
Thanks very much for coming in.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Nick is on his way to try out the natural painkilling plant, meadowsweet, that he and Eleanor picked.
Hello, Eleanor.
How are you? Perfect timing - kettle's just boiled.
Ah, fantastic! So, any chance of some of this meadowsweet tea? For sure.
See what it was like, being a Victorian taking some natural medicine.
Yes.
For you to experience it.
Just warm the pot.
It was quite difficult in Victorian times with pain control.
I mean, partly, pain was thought to be sent there by God so there's an issue about it.
When they introduced chloroform to stop the pain of childbirth, there was a lot of religious leaders against it, saying it was stopping God's work being done.
So they were quite a barrier to it.
Wow! And so, the movement against it was quite strong.
People were saying, "This is against God's way.
" Most of the natural products were used for pain control - well, there were only natural products - were opium and cannabis.
Queen Victoria had cannabis for her period pains.
What did the vicar say about that? I don't know.
I think perhaps they didn't tell him.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Mm.
It's quite restorative as just a smell, isn't it? Yes, it's lovely.
Almondy.
Good health, Nick.
Cheers.
Good health.
This is very good.
I was prepared for a bit of a witch's brew, but this is good.
For thousands of years, medicinal plants like meadowsweet, and also willow, had been used to control pain.
But by the end of the 19th Century, scientists had discovered that the plant's painkilling properties were due to a chemical called salicylic acid.
And it could be extracted using the latest laboratory techniques.
By isolating salicylic acid from meadowsweet and willow, they could produce a range of painkilling medicines.
It is the key ingredient in modern, non-prescription painkillers such as aspirin.
This is the source of salicylic acid.
It's willow bark.
Just from normal willow trees? Normal willow trees.
That, if you chew it It's quite bitter, isn't it? Hippocrates, in 400 BC, was prescribing an infusion of willow leaves, not the bark - you can use the leaves of the willow tree, as well as the bark - to ease the pain of childbirth.
2,500 years we have known this is a painkiller.
Salicylic acid can reduce pain, it also is antipyretic.
Right, so it reduces fever, if you are hot and feverish.
It is anti-inflammatory.
Things like rheumatism or if you have an inflamed area of your body - your gums can be inflamed, all sorts of areas.
It'll help treat that.
It's a bit of a wonder drug.
It is, isn't it? It's still used in wart treatments.
It's used in strong concentration, to like 60%, to burn off warts.
The first step is to grind this bark down.
If Nick and scientist Mike Bullivant can extract the salicylic acid from the willow bark, then Nick can make up painkillers to sell in the pharmacy.
Having ground it How are we going to get it out? .
.
the next step is to add some ether.
Ether? Why are we using ether? The ether is a solvent that will dissolve the salicylic acid.
I've got to just let this settle.
There's lots of little bits of dust in there, which I will allow to settle and then I'll just tap off the ether.
With the salicylic acid in.
Fantastic.
As Ruth is discovering, making a sheep-gut condom requires patience.
This has definitely changed in the alkali.
It's certainly bleached it.
It is much paler than it was and it seems to have loosened all the mucous membrane.
The next thing I've got to do with it .
.
so it says, is to sterilise Well, is to smoke it in brimstone smoke.
It doesn't say what for.
I think it's to sterilise it.
If I just stick this on the line for a minute.
Bleurgh! SHE CHUCKLES Brimstone, of course, is sulphur.
I went and got some of that out of the lab.
Just plain old sulphur.
And I've got to burn it.
I also found in the lab this Victorian smoke vessel.
What I've got to do is make the smoke inside there, with all of that hanging in there.
The fumes that you get off sulphur are quite poisonous, which is good in that it kills the bugs.
You've just got to be careful it doesn't kill the people too, while you're at it.
That's starting to look a bit more active, isn't it? In it goes.
Lid on.
Quite weird, isn't it? Making condoms and it looks like some sort of laboratory experiment you did at school.
The fumes seem to be clearing so presumably, that's that.
Just got to wash them out now and cut into lengths.
I don't want to offend my customers by making an inappropriate size.
OK.
Tied.
Oh, my goodness.
I don't want to do this bit! Ugh! I really don't want to do this bit.
I've got to inflate them, it says, so they can dry to size.
That is just too weird for words.
Hang it on the line and let it dry.
A finished sheep-gut condom would not have been cheap, so the custom generally was to wash them after use and keep for next time.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, a new alternative to tooth pulling arrived.
For those who could afford it, there was now the option of a filling, thanks to the dental treadle drill.
So I think the only thing we haven't talked about is this instrument here.
Right.
I suppose this must be Is it the treadle drill? A treadle drill.
Until about 1870, you didn't even have this sort of drill.
It worked simply on the basis you're going to put your foot up and down on the treadle, this revolves, comes right round here, drives gears in there right down to the hand piece.
It's a skill getting it started.
It is indeed.
Often if you twist that at the same time, that gets you going.
You have to keep up the motion.
There we go.
Not easy.
You're doing well.
You have to get your timing right.
You've got to concentrate on that, concentrate on your hand, concentrate on the patient's mouth.
And all the time trying to instil some confidence in the patient, I suppose.
We have to think about so many things at once here.
The thing is the faster you go, the better it is, cos there's less vibration on the tooth.
Still quite a lot.
This is trying to get a bit of speed up.
That's good, keep it up.
I've done that.
Slowly get that onto the tooth.
That's good - the faster the better.
Oh, I could really get a HE CHUCKLES It's kind of vicious, isn't it? It's starting to cut, though.
That's it.
Ooh.
Missed a little bit.
Oh, straight in.
Great.
That's looking really professional now.
You think of the vibration you can feel and the patient will feel it even more.
Oh, yeah.
Terrible vibration.
Whole jaw's moving.
Now you can see the dust coming up.
Of course, you have to remember not to blow if it's a patient's mouth.
Yes, that's a good point.
You'd have something called a chip syringe to blow it.
It's really difficult to be accurate there.
You go all over the place.
Absolutely.
Sorry, sir - I've scratched your teeth a bit.
And you're dealing with a patient who'll be moving around the whole time.
You've knocked the tooth out! Oh, no.
It'll just grow back, sir.
But you get the idea, anyway.
Now you know what it is.
Brilliant.
Having this done must have been quite expensive, then.
Indeed it was expensive - so much so, poor people wouldn't have had fillings usually.
They just would have waited until they had awful toothache, had the tooth taken out and that was it.
And indeed, some people even had - perhaps a bit later in the century - had teeth out for their 21st birthday, particularly females.
The idea was they had their teeth taken out before they got married and then there'd be no expense for the future husband.
Really? All teeth gone - that was the end of it.
Wow! So, would you get dentures, or? If you were poor, no, you didn't have dentures.
That was something the middle classes and rich people had.
Thanks very much for your advice.
My pleasure.
I think I might have another go on this.
You do.
Don't let anyone know.
DRILL WHIRRS I'm getting better at it now.
You are.
I think I would have been an over-enthusiastic dentist.
I think I would have quite enjoyed looking for the slightest problem that I could go and fix.
So I think I'd have a problem in terms of laying off the teeth, cos I really enjoyed using that drill.
In the lab, Nick and Mike are extracting the painkilling drug salicylic acid from the willow bark.
What's the stuff in the funnel there? A little wad of cotton wool.
I'm passing the solution through the cotton wool and that will filter off the fibres.
Any fibres that are suspended in the In the ether solution.
What is coming through the filter should be an ether solution of salicylic acid and other things.
The next step is getting rid of those other things, so we're left with as pure salicylic acid as possible.
Do you think this would have been worth it for the pharmacist, in terms of the cost of the ingredients and stuff and the yield of salicylic acid that they get out? The yield's really low - I suspect we're going to get a very low yield.
Don't expect too much.
But think it would have been, perhaps, economical if you had the time, because the willow bark is free.
Yeah.
It takes time and patience, doesn't it? Like life - take your time.
In goes the ether and salicylic acid and other things.
And other things.
To isolate the salicylic acid from all the other chemicals in the bark, it's first turned into a salt by adding sodium carbonate - better known as washing soda.
If I give a good shake, that's just getting the two layers mixed up as much as you possibly can.
The two layers are separated out.
Then Mike adds dilute sulphuric acid to turn the salt into solid salicylic acid.
Whoa! See, that's neutralising the sodium carbonate and converting it back to acid, you see? It's changing the colour and do you see that white solid coming down? Yes, absolutely.
Now, that salicylic acid that's forming - can you see? Yep.
A white, feathery solid.
So it's not looking too bad at the moment.
It's heartening that we've got some salicylic acid.
It's amazing - just three or four stages going from pieces of plant all the way through to a pure chemical.
Well A KIND of pure chemical.
Right, we'll leave it at that, I think.
I've added enough acid.
Just leave that to settle.
Fantastic.
Without effective birth control, in the 19th Century, unwanted pregnancies were all too common.
However, pills were becoming available that regulated women's periods - and a side effect of these pills was that if taken during pregnancy, they could trigger a miscarriage.
The lurid safety warnings on these medicines gave them an obvious appeal to women desperate to end their pregnancies - a fact that was not lost on many pharmacists, who did a roaring trade in "female pills".
It wouldn't be particularly hard to go and openly buy female pills, because they had this perfectly acceptable use.
The knowledge of how to use them to produce an abortion - that was the dodgy thing.
That was illegal and considered to be immoral and against the teachings of the Church.
Huge social pressure against that sort of knowledge.
It was quite suppressed.
It was also, of course, very dangerous, taking unregarded amounts of things that are toxic in your system.
People got into a terrible state and an awful lot of women died trying to induce an abortion.
In the pharmacy's display case, Ruth has discovered another disguised attempt at contraception.
This is one of the most exciting things I think I've found in the pharmacy.
A universal douche.
It may not sound much, but it is in fact one of the first widely available forms of contraception.
You would never know, would you, from the packaging.
It's very, very carefully general.
It says, "Universal douche.
For directions, see inside lid.
" It's only when you open and read it that the word "universal VAGINAL douche" comes in.
And that's it.
This could be openly on the shelves because there were medical uses for a vaginal douche, with the hygiene of keeping the vagina clean.
You had to be in the know, that it was also a form of contraception.
For hundreds of years, douches had been one of the most popular forms of birth control.
In reality, they were unlikely to work - and might even have increased the chances of conception.
Contraception was probably not on the minds of most of the men buying sheep-gut condoms, like the ones Ruth has made.
Purchased mainly to protect against disease rather than to guard against pregnancy, a gentleman customer would expect the pharmacist to supply them in confidence.
Of course, this would very much be a discretionary trade - one amongst gentlemen.
People really wouldn't appreciate having their private lives known about and discussed, so, I mean It's really about being able to trust the person you get these products from.
Really, there's two things.
One, you don't want anyone to know that you've bought them in the first place and secondly, that you want to be able to trust the actual products themselves and know that they'll work.
In a time when most people walked everywhere, relief from foot pain was in high demand.
Local businessman Richard Eley has come to see what the Victorian Pharmacy could offer for his problem.
Well, I have a rather painful, but rather small, corn on the inside of my little toe.
Oh, I see.
Yes, you can see a sore area.
The pain goes from my little toe up to my knee, to the point where I have considered having my little toe amputated.
Really, as bad as that? It offers Ruth an opportunity to find another use for salicylic acid.
In stronger concentrations, the chemical Nick and Mike have made as a painkiller can also be used to remove warts and corns.
Well, the Victorian wonder-drug for this - the thing that they thought was going to transform the care - was salicylic acid.
Ah, salicylic acid! And in fact, I've got Actually, this is a modern preparation of salicylic acid.
There's a few other things in here to carry the acid.
You can have it in liquid form or put on little corn plasters that you applied.
Yes.
You'd get a little tin with medicated corn plasters.
So, it's just Just at the side there.
Just there, yeah? That little area.
There we go.
That should whiten as it dries and you get a skin over it.
It holds the active ingredient against the affected part.
It does actually burn the skin away? Yeah, it sort of slowly kills the whole area and that allows the virus, basically, to be lifted out.
So Now you see it, now you don't.
Basically, you take that away and a drop every day on the same spot.
A drop every day keeps the corn away.
That's the theory.
Nick is ready to use the same chemical - the salicylic acid he and Mike made - to prepare some cachets, thin rice-paper capsules that he can fill with the finished drug.
As a modern pharmacist, it's a skill he's never needed to learn before.
There you are, Nick.
Here's your salicylic acid.
Fantastic.
Well done.
Last time you saw it, it was in a filter funnel and it looked like that.
I said I would purify it by re-crystallising it.
That was the result.
They're fantastic - really long needles.
You wanted it really pure, so I took that, the needles, and re-crystallised them and what I've ended up is really pure needles, which I've ground up.
You asked for it ground and that's it.
There's your pure salicylic acid.
Fantastic.
I'm going to stick them in these cachets.
I'm going to have to mix that It'd be such a small amount in each one, I'll mix it with something which is OK to swallow like citric acid, grind them together, make a nice mixture and then we just put an amount in each of these cachets.
Then we put the other half in this, close it up and they stick together.
You know those sweets - flying saucers, they were called, or spaceships.
Two halves of rice paper with some sherbet in the middle.
Stick them in your mouth and they dissolve and the sherbet's released.
This rice paper, as you know, once it gets wet - a bit of acid on it - it will fall apart and release the powder.
Ready for action.
There you are.
Don't use either of those, cos they're impure.
That's what you work with.
Brilliant.
Thanks very much, mate.
See you later.
Let's see how this goes.
This will be the top half of each cachet.
They are quite delicate so I'm quite worried about cracking them.
I don't know how far to press them in.
They're quite a tight fit.
Fingers crossed.
Dampness there.
Press these down and hope.
HE CHUCKLES That's all we can do at this stage.
And now, fingers crossed Yay! Look at that.
Fantastic.
Now, you use this thing to push them out as well.
I'm really pleased about this.
I didn't think it would work anywhere near as well as that.
Look at that - perfect cachets, holding together.
POWDER RATTLES You can hear the powder inside.
What we have been through is just, er a remarkable process, really, which doesn't happen nowadays.
It's the sort of thing which Everything's manufactured and standardised.
We started with willow bark - a natural product - and we've chemically extracted the key element and we've put the salicylic acid in here, in this dose form, ready to give to a patient, or as a Victorian person would give to a patient.
Salicylic acid was an effective painkiller, but could be a stomach irritant.
The big breakthrough came in 1899 when aspirin, a chemically altered version of it with less side effects, was released onto the market.
Whatever the content, cachets allowed pharmacists to dispense a pre-measured dose.
The practical problem for the patient was swallowing them.
Student Tom Chandler has volunteered to try one out.
.
.
powders put inside, in two halves The texts of the time would say, "Just take it down like an oyster.
" OK.
Is there any more advice than that you can give me? If you're not an oyster eater, it's not very helpful really.
No! I think you're going to have to work it out for yourself.
Are you willing to give it a go? Yeah, why not? Dunk it in the water.
OK, just get a bit wet.
That's it.
Is that enough? Yep.
In your mouth, back of the tongue.
OK.
And swig it down, swallow it.
Ugh! It feels like it's stuck about here.
Oh, my goodness.
It's big, isn't it? Yeah.
You wouldn't get a modern tablet that size.
But as it softens with the water and the moisture of your body, it will start deforming and be easier to go down.
Yeah, I can feel it sort of, like, moving.
Whereabouts is it now? It's about here, getting slightly lower.
It'll work its way down and in reality, you'd have a biscuit or a piece of bread with it or something like that, if it were stuck.
It physically knocks it down into the stomach, then dissolves and releases the drug and cures your headache, hopefully.
Thank you very much.
I bet you're glad science has moved on and now we have aspirin tablets.
I'm so glad.
Small things rather than those, definitely.
Photographer Terry King has set up a darkroom in the lab.
Tom is about to learn that the life of an amateur photographer could be hazardous.
OK, Terry.
We've taken our photograph - what do we do next? What we have to do now is to develop the photograph.
Things have changed.
In the late 1880s, things became a lot safer.
Before that - say, in the 1870s, 1860s - the plates would have been covered with something called collodion to hold the silver solutions.
Collodion was made out of gun cotton - the stuff that goes bang Right, OK.
.
.
dissolved in ether, which made you go to sleep and, er, it tended to shorten your life.
So as an amateur photographer, I could come into the pharmacy and get this stuff and do it a lot more safely and it's the sort of stuff that we'd be selling a lot more of towards the end of the In fact, it was even so safe that people used to do it on the kitchen table.
Great.
So, we can sell a lot of this stuff.
And so now, let's get on with it and let's make this place dark.
Great.
OK.
I'll get these drapes down.
Safer chemicals made photography much easier and far less risky, and pharmacists were able to profit from the new trade.
Is this the moment of truth? The moment of truth.
Let's see if we've got something on it.
There we are.
I think that's pretty good, don't you? Great.
It's quite good, that.
Wow! I think we should feel fairly pleased with ourselves.
Do we need to hang this up, then? Let's hang it up.
Shall I hold this here? Right on the edge.
OK, brilliant.
Lovely.
Brilliant.
The negative must now be left to dry before the print can be made.
Towards the end of Victoria's reign, an emerging middle class with an increased disposable income looked to the pharmacy for more than just cures.
They wanted to be pampered too.
The pharmacists' expertise with chemicals left them well placed to take advantage of this consumer boom.
Perfumier Alec Lawless is going to give Ruth a lesson in perfume making.
You've brought some amazing stuff.
This is things from the first perfumier's trade.
Things for making perfumes.
I suppose in the earlier periods, perfume was very much the reserve of the super-rich.
Then that changes now? It changes dramatically.
What characterised this age was the beginning of mass production and branding.
You could sell an eau de cologne and nobody was going to say, "You can't call that an eau de cologne.
" There were several perfumes like that.
One was called Jockey Club.
There was another called Mille Fleurs and another one called new New-mown Hay.
Basically these names became known as perfume.
The other thing was the pharmacist - because they'd been university trained, they liked experimenting and they had this whole cornucopia.
A lot of the things that were used in apothecaries for medicine were also perfume ingredients.
I recognise most of the things.
We've got a drawer full of myrrh sitting over there.
There you go.
That's sandalwood, isn't it? Sandalwood.
We've got a drawer of that up that end.
Many of these are ingredients we have medicinally in the pharmacy anyway.
How easy would it be for us as, you know, local pharmacists, to invent a perfume of our own? Well, a lot of them did and I'm sure like a lot of recipes at the time, these recipes come down.
But it's basically what you had in the fridge.
THEY CHUCKLE Could you give us some advice on how to make our own? What sort of things should we do and perhaps even a name - what sort of name would be appropriate? Maybe we should pay homage to Queen Victoria in some way.
That would tie in very nicely with parts of the Empire.
India - I mean, this is East Indian sandalwood, finest That's powerful.
It's one of the finest of all perfume ingredients and, of course, Queen Victoria is the Empress of India.
"Empress of India.
" I have to say, it sounds a lot nicer than Jockey Club.
Now we have to decide how to make it smell nice.
There were two oils and essences that were highly revered at the time but still not used in perfumery, because of the exorbitant cost.
One of them was Rose Otto and the other one was sandalwood.
We're going to use both of those because we want our perfume to be really posh.
Yes, but also relatively cheap to make that we can sell for a high profit.
Oh, good point.
OK.
We can put some other I'm going to put coriander in there.
That sounds a bit cheaper.
That's a really nice little top note.
The daft thing is, when I said I was doing this, the boys wanted to have a go too.
Boys and perfume? Nick and Tom both want to have a go too.
We thought we might all have a go.
Why don't we split the perfume into top notes, middle notes and base notes and each of you can have a play around and come up with the combination for each of those that you like the best.
OK.
I'll have a go with that.
Pharmacists were creating perfumes because they had the raw materials - they had the plant products, the aromatic products, the essences - and also, they needed to make money.
Some money to deposit.
Certainly, sir.
Thank you.
'If you look in the chemists and druggists of the time, 'you'll see pages of bankruptcies.
It was an expensive thing to be in.
' You needed to stock your shop, you needed to buy the shop, or rent it, so they had a lot of outgoings and they needed the income to keep going as well.
They were diversifying into any areas to do with their knowledge of chemicals and so on, which allowed them to make income.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
In the lab, Tom's photography lesson is about to reveal a snapshot of Victorian society.
He's mixing up gum arabic, a glue-like substance sometimes used in food preparation, with the light-sensitive chemical potassium dichromate and a coloured pigment.
Together, they create a photographic emulsion that reacts with sunlight - a technique that was particularly attractive to the discerning photographer.
So, this idea of making up - it's almost a paint isn't it? That's right.
This is the sort of thing amateur photographers would be doing towards the end of the 19th Century.
What was happening was all the amateur photographers had got Mr Kodak, George Eastman.
All the posh people though, "Oh, dear.
All these nasty lower orders are making photographs.
"We've got to do something more arty.
" This was a way of making photographs look like paintings.
It's essentially a photographic watercolour.
What we need to do is for YOU this time to coat the paper.
OK? Ready.
Ready.
Off you go.
That's it.
Continue Yes.
Then That's it.
It really is like painting, isn't it? It's amazing how close Just like painting a front door.
That's fine.
Well done.
Tom and Terry have reached the final stage of the photographic process.
To create the finished picture, the gum arabic mixture needs to be placed under the negative and exposed to the sun.
I mean, photography's absolutely central to so many different activities in the late 19th Century.
Well, yeah, I mean, right from the beginning, it was everything from military, spying, taking photographs from balloons.
Practically any activity you could think of, photography was involved in one way or another - just as it is today.
The sunlight hardens the gum arabic mixture, binding the pigment to the paper and creating an image which looks rather like a watercolour.
The popularity of this artistic method with wealthier photographers added even to the pharmacy's already lucrative photographic business.
I can now remove the glass and the negative and there we have an image.
What we want to do now is to wash away the softer parts, so that we get an image with more contrast.
Many of the developments in photography came from pharmacists.
Pharmacists were involved with the technology.
They were developing the chemicals, and all these different things.
It is the sort of thing, maybe If you were really good at this particular side of the pharmacy business, do you think you could set up on your own, maybe? I don't think there's any doubt about that.
They supplied the professional photographer Oh, yeah.
.
.
and, of course, millions of amateur photographers throughout the world.
Right.
Shall we take this and hang it up to dry? I think that's a good idea.
Nick, Ruth and Tom are receiving a crash course in perfume making as they try to create a scent that would have appealed to the Victorian nose.
19th Century perfumiers applied scientific ideas to the ancient art of perfume making.
They used musical terms to describe how a scent should be constructed.
This symphony of smell was made up of three separate mixtures of fragrant oils, known as the top, middle and base notes, which evaporate at different rates on the skin.
Perfumier Alec Lawless has given Tom the job of making up the long-lasting base note.
It seems that two of these are a lot stronger than the other three.
I was wondering if I'm sort of making Is it the base note? Yes.
What's the idea? These things are the most tenacious and the reason for that is that they're heavier molecules than the top or the middle notes.
OK.
So, they're going to retard the evaporation of the perfume.
So it's the bits that comes out last, basically.
This will be what's left on the skin.
Nick has been entrusted with the most expensive ingredients.
The smell is so intense that it's driving out anything.
These are the middle notes, the floral heart - the main personality of the perfume.
These guys are really expensive.
The powerful fragrances are proving a little too much for Ruth.
The lady is very sensitive and delicate.
You told me these were not overpowering.
You lied.
They are I'm sorry.
OK.
You are obviously incredibly sensitive.
I smelt all four of them first, by which time my nose was begin to burn, then I thought, the one that I liked best still was the bergamot oil so I put more of that in.
You mentioned the lime was particularly strong, so I put the least of that in.
I'm going to go for that one.
I suppose I ought to smell it, then.
OK.
They're still being masked by those.
I have to get somewhere where there isn't already a smell.
Oh, bless.
That's very orangey.
If the team's efforts can be combined into a popular perfume, then the Empress of India scent could be a real money-spinner for the pharmacy.
Now, in order to have some sort of structure, these will be blended.
Roughly, 50% of it is going to be the floral heart, 20% the top notes and 30% the base notes.
just as a rule of thumb.
I'm also going to put some musk in there and one or two other things.
THEY CHUCKLE Making it entirely your own.
They were too expensive to let you play with.
Alec blends the three sets of fragrant oils together to produce the finished perfume.
If you wave it around a bit to encourage the oxygen to accelerate the evaporation.
I didn't smell either of your two independently and this certainly smells very different from mine, when it's blended.
That's all right.
It's quite complex.
Let's compare.
Let's go for I've been looking forward to this all day.
Absolutely.
I think it's really funny you chaps are enjoying the perfume more than me.
All we need to do now is get that properly bottled and a nice label on it and start making some money out of it.
We can have different dilutions for different people.
Different classes.
Yes.
For you, we have the upper-class dilution.
Ruth is keen to find out if the Empress of India will be a hit with the ladies of the town.
Good morning.
Hello.
Ooh, hello.
Hello.
I wonder if you could help me.
I'm doing a bit of market research about perfume.
I love perfume.
Really? I do, yes.
That's a very fine bottle.
I do like that.
It's nice, isn't it? Let me know what you really think.
It's quite a potent one.
Have a little sniff and see what you think.
Ooh, yeah, it is, in't it? Strong, isn't it? It's quite strong.
It's lovely.
Yes.
It's quite flowery.
If I just pop just a tiny little bit on there.
Hmm! Oh! Ooh! It is a strong one, isn't it? Mm.
It's growing on me.
Well, that's a good sign.
Not nice, is it? Not nice.
I think it's more for you than for me.
One of the things the perfumier said to me was that it smells different on everybody.
Oh, it's beautiful.
Yes? It smells quite expensive.
It would have been expensive at the time.
In a Victorian period, you would begin to see perfume getting a little bit cheaper so people like school mistresses could afford, occasionally, a little bit of perfume.
I'm going to have some for Christmas.
You really think this something you would actually enjoy, that stand up against a modern perfume? Definitely - it's quite a strong powerful smell.
This is quite flowery which is lovely.
We were going to call it Empress of India.
What do you think about that? I think that sounds really royal and regal.
I like that.
Tom's finished photograph is ready for hanging.
Just had our photograph framed.
Really proud of it, actually.
It was such a long process to make - very much more involved than I imagined.
It was more painting a watercolour than anything else.
Very different to the "point and click" photography we do today.
The idea is we'll put this on the wall and people will come in and say, "Oh, that looks great.
How do I get to make something like that?" You see the shop and then us in the middle there, looking a little bit like ghosts.
Nick, Ruth and Tom have traced the evolution of the pharmacy through more than 60 years of Victoria's reign, reliving a revolution in public healthcare that put a chemist's shop in every town in Britain.
Today's modern pharmacy stocks a vast range of consumer goods - and this is a direct result of the entrepreneurial spirit of the Victorian pharmacists.
By the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the pharmacy was forever established as the High Street institution we know today.
I'm about finished back here.
How are you doing? Yeah, I think I'm pretty much done here.
Yeah.
Been a long journey, hasn't it? I'm never going to go into a pharmacy with the same eyes again.
Never.
You take it for granted.
It's one of those things that is always there.
Look at that.
That's rising.
I think I've value the skills and the experience and the expertise of pharmacists so much more than I did before we started.
The 19th Century - there's so many different things going on.
It is a place of scientific exploration, commercial development and all these different themes that you don't think about when you're going to a pharmacy.
Go on, Tilly, just for us.
I think I'll take away pride in the fact that chemists are a retail environment.
Here we have some.
That is not something to be ashamed of - it's something to be proud of.
Something which brought health to the masses in an accessible, effective way and it's something we should be proud of and celebrating.
APPLAUSE I suppose we'd better head off.
Leave this lovely place behind.
Right, well Sad to see it go, really.
It is.
I'll be very sad.
It'll be sad not being part of this Victorian world any more.
It is time to go, though, isn't it?
Morning.
At its heart stands the pharmacy - a treasure house of potions and remedies from a century and a half ago.
Now, in a unique experiment, historian Ruth Goodman, Professor of Pharmacy Nick Barber and PhD student Tom Quick have opened the doors to the Victorian pharmacy, recreating a High Street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea.
They've brought the pharmacy to life, sourcing ingredients, mixing potions and dispensing cures.
But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic and cold medicines were based on opium, the team are being highly selective.
They're only trying out safe versions of traditional remedies on carefully selected customers.
The start was like the Wild West - people didn't know what was good and bad.
Try to get a bit of speed up.
Oh, there we go! The pharmacy was something that affected everybody's lives in one way or another.
They're discovering an age of social change that brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time, heralding a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern High Street chemist as we know it today.
Having followed the evolution of the pharmacy through 50 remarkable years, Barber & Goodman's High Street shop is approaching the end of the 19th century - a period when pharmacies were responding to a fast-changing world of fresh opportunities.
And women, too, were entering a new age.
Now we're sort of coming towards the end of this journey through the 19th Century pharmacy, I really ought to have some clothes that are a bit more appropriate.
At the end of the century, women in business - and, of course, women WERE in business - were wanting to emphasise that sort of quality.
So they started dressing in a much more man-like way, to emphasise their sort of business credentials as such.
So you get women's suits, for those who wanted to show that they were in the world of work, holding their own professionally alongside the blokes.
Do you know? I think I could run the world of pharmacy dressed like this.
The pharmacy has now moved into a new era of scientific understanding.
Old ideas of what caused disease and how to treat it have faded away, and the foundations of modern medicine are firmly in place.
While other retailers had stayed fixed on their core business, pharmacies had seized every opportunity to expand their goods and services.
No longer just a provider of drugs and remedies, the Victorian pharmacy now sold a wide range of products which wouldn't look out of place in today's chemist shops.
This is what the whole of the 19th Century, in a sense, ends up as, isn't it? It's a culmination.
It comes up to this, doesn't it? And all of a sudden we have this scientific knowledge.
The pharmacist has the expertise.
We're stocking branded products, probably for the first time.
We're not making them ourselves any more.
Pharmacists are starting to look like Well, department stores.
An enterprising pharmacist used his chemical expertise and the materials he already had on his shelves to cater for one of the great growing fashions of the age.
Right.
That's ready.
Could you give me the slide? Photographer Terry King has come to demonstrate the latest technology.
Photography was invented in the very early years of Victoria's reign, but it wasn't until the 1880s that the real boom began.
Easier-to-use equipment gave amateur photography popular appeal as a hobby.
And that meant big profits for pharmacies who could supply the chemicals, process pictures and sell cameras.
I'll just check once more that we've got the focus right.
Slide out.
We're all ready.
Watch the birdie.
Keep still while we do it.
Thank you very much.
We're done now.
Later, after Terry has set up a darkroom, Tom will be learning how to develop the photograph.
It's early spring, and in the fields around Barber & Goodman's Shropshire pharmacy, many medicinal plants are beginning to emerge.
Nick and herbalist Eleanor Gallia are on the hunt for one of the most effective traditional painkillers.
So, what's this plant we're seeking? Meadowsweet.
Filipendula ulmaria.
Beautiful name! I could marry someone called that.
And what was it used for? Digestive, calming digestive.
Very popular in rheumatism.
Pain relief.
Diaphoretic, so used to help sweat out the early stages of a fever.
I keep thinking I see little bits of it.
It's very small at the moment.
There's some here, actually.
More of it here.
So, the effects depend partly on the time of the year when it's picked, and obviously the parts of the plant which are picked? Was that something which herbalists and chemists and druggists would have paid attention to? Hugely.
Very, very important.
Especially so when, traditionally, herbalists were collecting their own herbs, then dispensing their own herbs and making up tinctures and medicines.
So, shall we pick some meadowsweet then? Yes, let's.
Remembering all the time that this is just the very young growth.
So this would help from diaphoresis, the sweating of an early fever.
But really, the main action, the anti-acid action, which is It's got a lovely soothing action on the inside of the stomach.
It helps the mucosa, the alkali which protects the gut from the acid that's produced in the whole digestive process.
We can make an infusion out of it, make it like a tea? Yes.
The key of making an infusion is always to make it in a warmed pot.
Mm-hm.
With a lid.
Really? Yes, very important.
That way, you preserve any of the volatile oils.
Oh, right.
Volatile coming from "volar" - "to fly".
Really? The little oils, they're all longing to fly away.
You give them hot water and off they go, so you have to quickly catch them with a lid.
Ruth has collected the raw ingredients for a product that would quickly become a popular "under the counter" product.
What I'm actually making here are condoms.
This is sheep's intestine.
Of course, it's the small intestine, not the large intestine! I can't say that this is the pleasantest of jobs.
It's pretty smelly, pretty dirty.
So, having pulled it apart from the rest of the stomach contents, I'm just squeezing it so that everything inside comes out.
I mean, this is the intestinal tract, so it's sort of partly digested grass, basically.
Oh, I've ruptured it, at the side.
I'm not actually expecting anybody to actually wear this.
So I could sort of think, "Oh well, it doesn't matter.
" But I sort of want to get it right.
I quite like the whole experimental thing.
I want to make one that works.
So I've got quite a number of processes to go through before this is a finished product.
It's got to soak for a bit, then I've got to turn the whole thing inside out, so I can make sure the inside is thoroughly cleaned.
And it's then got to be macerated - lightly worked and soaked - in an alkali substance, to sterilise it.
Then I've got to dry it out over brimstone, sulphur fumes.
Again, we're trying to sterilise the whole thing.
And then I can start shaping it.
So, alkali overnight, change the alkali in the morning.
Condoms in one form or another had been available for centuries.
Whether they were made of sheep gut or, after the vulcanisation of rubber, made of rubber.
They had never had any effect whatsoever on the birth rate.
They had been used almost exclusively to protect men from sexual disease, when they were busily playing around.
Keen to exploit every business opportunity in the 1890s, pharmacies began offering another new service to their customers.
With only one qualified dentist for every 8,500 people, there was money to be made from tooth pulling.
Retired dentist and dental historian Professor Stanley Gelbier has come to train Tom up.
What I don't understand, Stanley, is, as a pharmacist's assistant, why would I be extracting teeth? That's quite simple, really, cos you're going to be one of a number of people who were extracting teeth at that particular time of the century.
In London, many of them were surgeons who also did dentistry almost as a sideline.
As you got outside London, you had a variety of other people.
You had blacksmiths.
They could make the tools in their forge, and then they would actually use them.
Some were a wig makers, silversmiths, a whole load of different people.
It must have been quite a market for it? What state were Victorian people's teeth in at this time? A lot of people had bad teeth.
The problem was sugar, as always.
Their mouths were often full of bad teeth.
They had pus straining into their mouth through gum boils et cetera, so it was quite horrific and quite smelly.
But the thing is, dentistry was horrific at that time, so people didn't rush to get their teeth treated until it was absolutely essential.
Right, so shall we just have a go, and see how I go about this, then? So what would I be using here? Why don't we try out one of the keys? The brutally efficient dental key was the weapon of choice for extracting diseased teeth.
Some earlier ones wouldn't have had a handle - just a straight piece of metal.
This was more sophisticated, more comfortable - you get a better grip.
Why don't we try it out on your finger first? Er, OK.
There we are.
It won't take your finger off.
I am just hooking it over.
We can see that now.
As I slowly turn, feel the grip.
Very tight.
So we won't do any more.
You have a try.
Try it on this.
I need to go round the back here then.
You can't do that because that will be the back of the head, the throat.
You need to go in through the mouth.
Get that gripping on the tooth.
Then, when you grip, quick yank.
That's it - it's gone.
Wow.
You can see how that would do quite a lot of damage.
That's right.
More often than not, not only the tooth comes out.
Sometimes the tooth breaks, sometimes it comes straight out.
Often you damage the gum around the tooth and the bone around the tooth, but it was really horrific.
Remember, this is a day when they had no anaesthetics.
It really was painful.
That's not a friendly technology for your mouth.
No, no.
Not at all.
To avoid the terror of tooth pulling, wealthier customers might lavish some care on their teeth with a tooth powder, or dentifrice, specially prepared by their pharmacist.
What I've been doing is grinding up some myrrh and we're going to use it to make a dentifrice, which is what they used before they used toothpaste.
It is a powder and a mixture of various things, which I am going to be bringing together.
At this stage, they didn't use toothpaste because of a practical reason, which is, in particular, they couldn't get tubes, which we're so used to now.
It was only went soft metal tubes were made available in about the 1890s that they could put toothpaste into these tubes and be able to have them sealed and used in a way which we are so used to now.
First thing I'm going to do is mix some chalk together with some peppermint oil.
Some of the orris root.
This is a plant substance.
We've got some lumps in here because of the mixture of the oil and the chalk - sort of binds it together and makes a bit it lumpy.
We'll try and get rid of those, but we will be sieving it before we give it out - before we produce it as the final product.
Pharmacists would sometimes add ground cuttlefish, brick dust, and even crushed china, to their toothpowders for extra abrasive effect.
We've got some soap flakes coming in as well.
Soap was used, as you can imagine .
.
to clean the teeth.
The art of mixing is extremely important.
It is no use having a dilution of something if you end up with a concentrated part of it which is poisonous or dangerous in some ways.
I am worried that will be given to someone.
I'll be rubbing some on my own gums before I'm giving it to anyone else.
That sense of responsibility was there all the time.
That whole concept of checking is so important in pharmacy, because you only have to make the careless error we all make in aspects of our life and you can severely harm someone.
We are getting close to being ready to try it.
We'll try sieving down a small amount.
That's looking good.
Hello, Helen.
How are you? This is what I'll be testing then? It is indeed.
Very kind of you to volunteer to try this.
Helen Wright is a researcher of dental diseases, and the perfect customer to assess the quality and appeal of Nick's concoction.
It would be presented in one of these little pots and they'd have a toothbrush.
I've got a lovely selection of toothbrushes here.
Are you ready to give this a go? Yep.
Pick a toothbrush.
This one here - it's nice and small.
Give it a try - see how much sticks on.
I have to say Yeah, it seems to stick well to the toothbrush.
Good.
Here we go.
Let me give it a try as well.
Put some on my finger.
You're still standing - that's a good start.
What's it like? It's got a definite zing to it, hasn't it? I can feel the inside of my lips and gums tingling.
It's a real That'll be the myrrh doing that.
I'm just waiting to see if there's a secondary kick.
You can smell the peppermint.
You can't taste it too much, though.
You can feel it's gritty on your teeth.
I certainly can with my finger.
They feel nice and clean using a brush though.
Might have a product here.
I've got a pot here for you to take away.
And a toothbrush as well.
Thank you.
Thanks very much for coming in.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Nick is on his way to try out the natural painkilling plant, meadowsweet, that he and Eleanor picked.
Hello, Eleanor.
How are you? Perfect timing - kettle's just boiled.
Ah, fantastic! So, any chance of some of this meadowsweet tea? For sure.
See what it was like, being a Victorian taking some natural medicine.
Yes.
For you to experience it.
Just warm the pot.
It was quite difficult in Victorian times with pain control.
I mean, partly, pain was thought to be sent there by God so there's an issue about it.
When they introduced chloroform to stop the pain of childbirth, there was a lot of religious leaders against it, saying it was stopping God's work being done.
So they were quite a barrier to it.
Wow! And so, the movement against it was quite strong.
People were saying, "This is against God's way.
" Most of the natural products were used for pain control - well, there were only natural products - were opium and cannabis.
Queen Victoria had cannabis for her period pains.
What did the vicar say about that? I don't know.
I think perhaps they didn't tell him.
Fantastic.
Thank you.
Mm.
It's quite restorative as just a smell, isn't it? Yes, it's lovely.
Almondy.
Good health, Nick.
Cheers.
Good health.
This is very good.
I was prepared for a bit of a witch's brew, but this is good.
For thousands of years, medicinal plants like meadowsweet, and also willow, had been used to control pain.
But by the end of the 19th Century, scientists had discovered that the plant's painkilling properties were due to a chemical called salicylic acid.
And it could be extracted using the latest laboratory techniques.
By isolating salicylic acid from meadowsweet and willow, they could produce a range of painkilling medicines.
It is the key ingredient in modern, non-prescription painkillers such as aspirin.
This is the source of salicylic acid.
It's willow bark.
Just from normal willow trees? Normal willow trees.
That, if you chew it It's quite bitter, isn't it? Hippocrates, in 400 BC, was prescribing an infusion of willow leaves, not the bark - you can use the leaves of the willow tree, as well as the bark - to ease the pain of childbirth.
2,500 years we have known this is a painkiller.
Salicylic acid can reduce pain, it also is antipyretic.
Right, so it reduces fever, if you are hot and feverish.
It is anti-inflammatory.
Things like rheumatism or if you have an inflamed area of your body - your gums can be inflamed, all sorts of areas.
It'll help treat that.
It's a bit of a wonder drug.
It is, isn't it? It's still used in wart treatments.
It's used in strong concentration, to like 60%, to burn off warts.
The first step is to grind this bark down.
If Nick and scientist Mike Bullivant can extract the salicylic acid from the willow bark, then Nick can make up painkillers to sell in the pharmacy.
Having ground it How are we going to get it out? .
.
the next step is to add some ether.
Ether? Why are we using ether? The ether is a solvent that will dissolve the salicylic acid.
I've got to just let this settle.
There's lots of little bits of dust in there, which I will allow to settle and then I'll just tap off the ether.
With the salicylic acid in.
Fantastic.
As Ruth is discovering, making a sheep-gut condom requires patience.
This has definitely changed in the alkali.
It's certainly bleached it.
It is much paler than it was and it seems to have loosened all the mucous membrane.
The next thing I've got to do with it .
.
so it says, is to sterilise Well, is to smoke it in brimstone smoke.
It doesn't say what for.
I think it's to sterilise it.
If I just stick this on the line for a minute.
Bleurgh! SHE CHUCKLES Brimstone, of course, is sulphur.
I went and got some of that out of the lab.
Just plain old sulphur.
And I've got to burn it.
I also found in the lab this Victorian smoke vessel.
What I've got to do is make the smoke inside there, with all of that hanging in there.
The fumes that you get off sulphur are quite poisonous, which is good in that it kills the bugs.
You've just got to be careful it doesn't kill the people too, while you're at it.
That's starting to look a bit more active, isn't it? In it goes.
Lid on.
Quite weird, isn't it? Making condoms and it looks like some sort of laboratory experiment you did at school.
The fumes seem to be clearing so presumably, that's that.
Just got to wash them out now and cut into lengths.
I don't want to offend my customers by making an inappropriate size.
OK.
Tied.
Oh, my goodness.
I don't want to do this bit! Ugh! I really don't want to do this bit.
I've got to inflate them, it says, so they can dry to size.
That is just too weird for words.
Hang it on the line and let it dry.
A finished sheep-gut condom would not have been cheap, so the custom generally was to wash them after use and keep for next time.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, a new alternative to tooth pulling arrived.
For those who could afford it, there was now the option of a filling, thanks to the dental treadle drill.
So I think the only thing we haven't talked about is this instrument here.
Right.
I suppose this must be Is it the treadle drill? A treadle drill.
Until about 1870, you didn't even have this sort of drill.
It worked simply on the basis you're going to put your foot up and down on the treadle, this revolves, comes right round here, drives gears in there right down to the hand piece.
It's a skill getting it started.
It is indeed.
Often if you twist that at the same time, that gets you going.
You have to keep up the motion.
There we go.
Not easy.
You're doing well.
You have to get your timing right.
You've got to concentrate on that, concentrate on your hand, concentrate on the patient's mouth.
And all the time trying to instil some confidence in the patient, I suppose.
We have to think about so many things at once here.
The thing is the faster you go, the better it is, cos there's less vibration on the tooth.
Still quite a lot.
This is trying to get a bit of speed up.
That's good, keep it up.
I've done that.
Slowly get that onto the tooth.
That's good - the faster the better.
Oh, I could really get a HE CHUCKLES It's kind of vicious, isn't it? It's starting to cut, though.
That's it.
Ooh.
Missed a little bit.
Oh, straight in.
Great.
That's looking really professional now.
You think of the vibration you can feel and the patient will feel it even more.
Oh, yeah.
Terrible vibration.
Whole jaw's moving.
Now you can see the dust coming up.
Of course, you have to remember not to blow if it's a patient's mouth.
Yes, that's a good point.
You'd have something called a chip syringe to blow it.
It's really difficult to be accurate there.
You go all over the place.
Absolutely.
Sorry, sir - I've scratched your teeth a bit.
And you're dealing with a patient who'll be moving around the whole time.
You've knocked the tooth out! Oh, no.
It'll just grow back, sir.
But you get the idea, anyway.
Now you know what it is.
Brilliant.
Having this done must have been quite expensive, then.
Indeed it was expensive - so much so, poor people wouldn't have had fillings usually.
They just would have waited until they had awful toothache, had the tooth taken out and that was it.
And indeed, some people even had - perhaps a bit later in the century - had teeth out for their 21st birthday, particularly females.
The idea was they had their teeth taken out before they got married and then there'd be no expense for the future husband.
Really? All teeth gone - that was the end of it.
Wow! So, would you get dentures, or? If you were poor, no, you didn't have dentures.
That was something the middle classes and rich people had.
Thanks very much for your advice.
My pleasure.
I think I might have another go on this.
You do.
Don't let anyone know.
DRILL WHIRRS I'm getting better at it now.
You are.
I think I would have been an over-enthusiastic dentist.
I think I would have quite enjoyed looking for the slightest problem that I could go and fix.
So I think I'd have a problem in terms of laying off the teeth, cos I really enjoyed using that drill.
In the lab, Nick and Mike are extracting the painkilling drug salicylic acid from the willow bark.
What's the stuff in the funnel there? A little wad of cotton wool.
I'm passing the solution through the cotton wool and that will filter off the fibres.
Any fibres that are suspended in the In the ether solution.
What is coming through the filter should be an ether solution of salicylic acid and other things.
The next step is getting rid of those other things, so we're left with as pure salicylic acid as possible.
Do you think this would have been worth it for the pharmacist, in terms of the cost of the ingredients and stuff and the yield of salicylic acid that they get out? The yield's really low - I suspect we're going to get a very low yield.
Don't expect too much.
But think it would have been, perhaps, economical if you had the time, because the willow bark is free.
Yeah.
It takes time and patience, doesn't it? Like life - take your time.
In goes the ether and salicylic acid and other things.
And other things.
To isolate the salicylic acid from all the other chemicals in the bark, it's first turned into a salt by adding sodium carbonate - better known as washing soda.
If I give a good shake, that's just getting the two layers mixed up as much as you possibly can.
The two layers are separated out.
Then Mike adds dilute sulphuric acid to turn the salt into solid salicylic acid.
Whoa! See, that's neutralising the sodium carbonate and converting it back to acid, you see? It's changing the colour and do you see that white solid coming down? Yes, absolutely.
Now, that salicylic acid that's forming - can you see? Yep.
A white, feathery solid.
So it's not looking too bad at the moment.
It's heartening that we've got some salicylic acid.
It's amazing - just three or four stages going from pieces of plant all the way through to a pure chemical.
Well A KIND of pure chemical.
Right, we'll leave it at that, I think.
I've added enough acid.
Just leave that to settle.
Fantastic.
Without effective birth control, in the 19th Century, unwanted pregnancies were all too common.
However, pills were becoming available that regulated women's periods - and a side effect of these pills was that if taken during pregnancy, they could trigger a miscarriage.
The lurid safety warnings on these medicines gave them an obvious appeal to women desperate to end their pregnancies - a fact that was not lost on many pharmacists, who did a roaring trade in "female pills".
It wouldn't be particularly hard to go and openly buy female pills, because they had this perfectly acceptable use.
The knowledge of how to use them to produce an abortion - that was the dodgy thing.
That was illegal and considered to be immoral and against the teachings of the Church.
Huge social pressure against that sort of knowledge.
It was quite suppressed.
It was also, of course, very dangerous, taking unregarded amounts of things that are toxic in your system.
People got into a terrible state and an awful lot of women died trying to induce an abortion.
In the pharmacy's display case, Ruth has discovered another disguised attempt at contraception.
This is one of the most exciting things I think I've found in the pharmacy.
A universal douche.
It may not sound much, but it is in fact one of the first widely available forms of contraception.
You would never know, would you, from the packaging.
It's very, very carefully general.
It says, "Universal douche.
For directions, see inside lid.
" It's only when you open and read it that the word "universal VAGINAL douche" comes in.
And that's it.
This could be openly on the shelves because there were medical uses for a vaginal douche, with the hygiene of keeping the vagina clean.
You had to be in the know, that it was also a form of contraception.
For hundreds of years, douches had been one of the most popular forms of birth control.
In reality, they were unlikely to work - and might even have increased the chances of conception.
Contraception was probably not on the minds of most of the men buying sheep-gut condoms, like the ones Ruth has made.
Purchased mainly to protect against disease rather than to guard against pregnancy, a gentleman customer would expect the pharmacist to supply them in confidence.
Of course, this would very much be a discretionary trade - one amongst gentlemen.
People really wouldn't appreciate having their private lives known about and discussed, so, I mean It's really about being able to trust the person you get these products from.
Really, there's two things.
One, you don't want anyone to know that you've bought them in the first place and secondly, that you want to be able to trust the actual products themselves and know that they'll work.
In a time when most people walked everywhere, relief from foot pain was in high demand.
Local businessman Richard Eley has come to see what the Victorian Pharmacy could offer for his problem.
Well, I have a rather painful, but rather small, corn on the inside of my little toe.
Oh, I see.
Yes, you can see a sore area.
The pain goes from my little toe up to my knee, to the point where I have considered having my little toe amputated.
Really, as bad as that? It offers Ruth an opportunity to find another use for salicylic acid.
In stronger concentrations, the chemical Nick and Mike have made as a painkiller can also be used to remove warts and corns.
Well, the Victorian wonder-drug for this - the thing that they thought was going to transform the care - was salicylic acid.
Ah, salicylic acid! And in fact, I've got Actually, this is a modern preparation of salicylic acid.
There's a few other things in here to carry the acid.
You can have it in liquid form or put on little corn plasters that you applied.
Yes.
You'd get a little tin with medicated corn plasters.
So, it's just Just at the side there.
Just there, yeah? That little area.
There we go.
That should whiten as it dries and you get a skin over it.
It holds the active ingredient against the affected part.
It does actually burn the skin away? Yeah, it sort of slowly kills the whole area and that allows the virus, basically, to be lifted out.
So Now you see it, now you don't.
Basically, you take that away and a drop every day on the same spot.
A drop every day keeps the corn away.
That's the theory.
Nick is ready to use the same chemical - the salicylic acid he and Mike made - to prepare some cachets, thin rice-paper capsules that he can fill with the finished drug.
As a modern pharmacist, it's a skill he's never needed to learn before.
There you are, Nick.
Here's your salicylic acid.
Fantastic.
Well done.
Last time you saw it, it was in a filter funnel and it looked like that.
I said I would purify it by re-crystallising it.
That was the result.
They're fantastic - really long needles.
You wanted it really pure, so I took that, the needles, and re-crystallised them and what I've ended up is really pure needles, which I've ground up.
You asked for it ground and that's it.
There's your pure salicylic acid.
Fantastic.
I'm going to stick them in these cachets.
I'm going to have to mix that It'd be such a small amount in each one, I'll mix it with something which is OK to swallow like citric acid, grind them together, make a nice mixture and then we just put an amount in each of these cachets.
Then we put the other half in this, close it up and they stick together.
You know those sweets - flying saucers, they were called, or spaceships.
Two halves of rice paper with some sherbet in the middle.
Stick them in your mouth and they dissolve and the sherbet's released.
This rice paper, as you know, once it gets wet - a bit of acid on it - it will fall apart and release the powder.
Ready for action.
There you are.
Don't use either of those, cos they're impure.
That's what you work with.
Brilliant.
Thanks very much, mate.
See you later.
Let's see how this goes.
This will be the top half of each cachet.
They are quite delicate so I'm quite worried about cracking them.
I don't know how far to press them in.
They're quite a tight fit.
Fingers crossed.
Dampness there.
Press these down and hope.
HE CHUCKLES That's all we can do at this stage.
And now, fingers crossed Yay! Look at that.
Fantastic.
Now, you use this thing to push them out as well.
I'm really pleased about this.
I didn't think it would work anywhere near as well as that.
Look at that - perfect cachets, holding together.
POWDER RATTLES You can hear the powder inside.
What we have been through is just, er a remarkable process, really, which doesn't happen nowadays.
It's the sort of thing which Everything's manufactured and standardised.
We started with willow bark - a natural product - and we've chemically extracted the key element and we've put the salicylic acid in here, in this dose form, ready to give to a patient, or as a Victorian person would give to a patient.
Salicylic acid was an effective painkiller, but could be a stomach irritant.
The big breakthrough came in 1899 when aspirin, a chemically altered version of it with less side effects, was released onto the market.
Whatever the content, cachets allowed pharmacists to dispense a pre-measured dose.
The practical problem for the patient was swallowing them.
Student Tom Chandler has volunteered to try one out.
.
.
powders put inside, in two halves The texts of the time would say, "Just take it down like an oyster.
" OK.
Is there any more advice than that you can give me? If you're not an oyster eater, it's not very helpful really.
No! I think you're going to have to work it out for yourself.
Are you willing to give it a go? Yeah, why not? Dunk it in the water.
OK, just get a bit wet.
That's it.
Is that enough? Yep.
In your mouth, back of the tongue.
OK.
And swig it down, swallow it.
Ugh! It feels like it's stuck about here.
Oh, my goodness.
It's big, isn't it? Yeah.
You wouldn't get a modern tablet that size.
But as it softens with the water and the moisture of your body, it will start deforming and be easier to go down.
Yeah, I can feel it sort of, like, moving.
Whereabouts is it now? It's about here, getting slightly lower.
It'll work its way down and in reality, you'd have a biscuit or a piece of bread with it or something like that, if it were stuck.
It physically knocks it down into the stomach, then dissolves and releases the drug and cures your headache, hopefully.
Thank you very much.
I bet you're glad science has moved on and now we have aspirin tablets.
I'm so glad.
Small things rather than those, definitely.
Photographer Terry King has set up a darkroom in the lab.
Tom is about to learn that the life of an amateur photographer could be hazardous.
OK, Terry.
We've taken our photograph - what do we do next? What we have to do now is to develop the photograph.
Things have changed.
In the late 1880s, things became a lot safer.
Before that - say, in the 1870s, 1860s - the plates would have been covered with something called collodion to hold the silver solutions.
Collodion was made out of gun cotton - the stuff that goes bang Right, OK.
.
.
dissolved in ether, which made you go to sleep and, er, it tended to shorten your life.
So as an amateur photographer, I could come into the pharmacy and get this stuff and do it a lot more safely and it's the sort of stuff that we'd be selling a lot more of towards the end of the In fact, it was even so safe that people used to do it on the kitchen table.
Great.
So, we can sell a lot of this stuff.
And so now, let's get on with it and let's make this place dark.
Great.
OK.
I'll get these drapes down.
Safer chemicals made photography much easier and far less risky, and pharmacists were able to profit from the new trade.
Is this the moment of truth? The moment of truth.
Let's see if we've got something on it.
There we are.
I think that's pretty good, don't you? Great.
It's quite good, that.
Wow! I think we should feel fairly pleased with ourselves.
Do we need to hang this up, then? Let's hang it up.
Shall I hold this here? Right on the edge.
OK, brilliant.
Lovely.
Brilliant.
The negative must now be left to dry before the print can be made.
Towards the end of Victoria's reign, an emerging middle class with an increased disposable income looked to the pharmacy for more than just cures.
They wanted to be pampered too.
The pharmacists' expertise with chemicals left them well placed to take advantage of this consumer boom.
Perfumier Alec Lawless is going to give Ruth a lesson in perfume making.
You've brought some amazing stuff.
This is things from the first perfumier's trade.
Things for making perfumes.
I suppose in the earlier periods, perfume was very much the reserve of the super-rich.
Then that changes now? It changes dramatically.
What characterised this age was the beginning of mass production and branding.
You could sell an eau de cologne and nobody was going to say, "You can't call that an eau de cologne.
" There were several perfumes like that.
One was called Jockey Club.
There was another called Mille Fleurs and another one called new New-mown Hay.
Basically these names became known as perfume.
The other thing was the pharmacist - because they'd been university trained, they liked experimenting and they had this whole cornucopia.
A lot of the things that were used in apothecaries for medicine were also perfume ingredients.
I recognise most of the things.
We've got a drawer full of myrrh sitting over there.
There you go.
That's sandalwood, isn't it? Sandalwood.
We've got a drawer of that up that end.
Many of these are ingredients we have medicinally in the pharmacy anyway.
How easy would it be for us as, you know, local pharmacists, to invent a perfume of our own? Well, a lot of them did and I'm sure like a lot of recipes at the time, these recipes come down.
But it's basically what you had in the fridge.
THEY CHUCKLE Could you give us some advice on how to make our own? What sort of things should we do and perhaps even a name - what sort of name would be appropriate? Maybe we should pay homage to Queen Victoria in some way.
That would tie in very nicely with parts of the Empire.
India - I mean, this is East Indian sandalwood, finest That's powerful.
It's one of the finest of all perfume ingredients and, of course, Queen Victoria is the Empress of India.
"Empress of India.
" I have to say, it sounds a lot nicer than Jockey Club.
Now we have to decide how to make it smell nice.
There were two oils and essences that were highly revered at the time but still not used in perfumery, because of the exorbitant cost.
One of them was Rose Otto and the other one was sandalwood.
We're going to use both of those because we want our perfume to be really posh.
Yes, but also relatively cheap to make that we can sell for a high profit.
Oh, good point.
OK.
We can put some other I'm going to put coriander in there.
That sounds a bit cheaper.
That's a really nice little top note.
The daft thing is, when I said I was doing this, the boys wanted to have a go too.
Boys and perfume? Nick and Tom both want to have a go too.
We thought we might all have a go.
Why don't we split the perfume into top notes, middle notes and base notes and each of you can have a play around and come up with the combination for each of those that you like the best.
OK.
I'll have a go with that.
Pharmacists were creating perfumes because they had the raw materials - they had the plant products, the aromatic products, the essences - and also, they needed to make money.
Some money to deposit.
Certainly, sir.
Thank you.
'If you look in the chemists and druggists of the time, 'you'll see pages of bankruptcies.
It was an expensive thing to be in.
' You needed to stock your shop, you needed to buy the shop, or rent it, so they had a lot of outgoings and they needed the income to keep going as well.
They were diversifying into any areas to do with their knowledge of chemicals and so on, which allowed them to make income.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
In the lab, Tom's photography lesson is about to reveal a snapshot of Victorian society.
He's mixing up gum arabic, a glue-like substance sometimes used in food preparation, with the light-sensitive chemical potassium dichromate and a coloured pigment.
Together, they create a photographic emulsion that reacts with sunlight - a technique that was particularly attractive to the discerning photographer.
So, this idea of making up - it's almost a paint isn't it? That's right.
This is the sort of thing amateur photographers would be doing towards the end of the 19th Century.
What was happening was all the amateur photographers had got Mr Kodak, George Eastman.
All the posh people though, "Oh, dear.
All these nasty lower orders are making photographs.
"We've got to do something more arty.
" This was a way of making photographs look like paintings.
It's essentially a photographic watercolour.
What we need to do is for YOU this time to coat the paper.
OK? Ready.
Ready.
Off you go.
That's it.
Continue Yes.
Then That's it.
It really is like painting, isn't it? It's amazing how close Just like painting a front door.
That's fine.
Well done.
Tom and Terry have reached the final stage of the photographic process.
To create the finished picture, the gum arabic mixture needs to be placed under the negative and exposed to the sun.
I mean, photography's absolutely central to so many different activities in the late 19th Century.
Well, yeah, I mean, right from the beginning, it was everything from military, spying, taking photographs from balloons.
Practically any activity you could think of, photography was involved in one way or another - just as it is today.
The sunlight hardens the gum arabic mixture, binding the pigment to the paper and creating an image which looks rather like a watercolour.
The popularity of this artistic method with wealthier photographers added even to the pharmacy's already lucrative photographic business.
I can now remove the glass and the negative and there we have an image.
What we want to do now is to wash away the softer parts, so that we get an image with more contrast.
Many of the developments in photography came from pharmacists.
Pharmacists were involved with the technology.
They were developing the chemicals, and all these different things.
It is the sort of thing, maybe If you were really good at this particular side of the pharmacy business, do you think you could set up on your own, maybe? I don't think there's any doubt about that.
They supplied the professional photographer Oh, yeah.
.
.
and, of course, millions of amateur photographers throughout the world.
Right.
Shall we take this and hang it up to dry? I think that's a good idea.
Nick, Ruth and Tom are receiving a crash course in perfume making as they try to create a scent that would have appealed to the Victorian nose.
19th Century perfumiers applied scientific ideas to the ancient art of perfume making.
They used musical terms to describe how a scent should be constructed.
This symphony of smell was made up of three separate mixtures of fragrant oils, known as the top, middle and base notes, which evaporate at different rates on the skin.
Perfumier Alec Lawless has given Tom the job of making up the long-lasting base note.
It seems that two of these are a lot stronger than the other three.
I was wondering if I'm sort of making Is it the base note? Yes.
What's the idea? These things are the most tenacious and the reason for that is that they're heavier molecules than the top or the middle notes.
OK.
So, they're going to retard the evaporation of the perfume.
So it's the bits that comes out last, basically.
This will be what's left on the skin.
Nick has been entrusted with the most expensive ingredients.
The smell is so intense that it's driving out anything.
These are the middle notes, the floral heart - the main personality of the perfume.
These guys are really expensive.
The powerful fragrances are proving a little too much for Ruth.
The lady is very sensitive and delicate.
You told me these were not overpowering.
You lied.
They are I'm sorry.
OK.
You are obviously incredibly sensitive.
I smelt all four of them first, by which time my nose was begin to burn, then I thought, the one that I liked best still was the bergamot oil so I put more of that in.
You mentioned the lime was particularly strong, so I put the least of that in.
I'm going to go for that one.
I suppose I ought to smell it, then.
OK.
They're still being masked by those.
I have to get somewhere where there isn't already a smell.
Oh, bless.
That's very orangey.
If the team's efforts can be combined into a popular perfume, then the Empress of India scent could be a real money-spinner for the pharmacy.
Now, in order to have some sort of structure, these will be blended.
Roughly, 50% of it is going to be the floral heart, 20% the top notes and 30% the base notes.
just as a rule of thumb.
I'm also going to put some musk in there and one or two other things.
THEY CHUCKLE Making it entirely your own.
They were too expensive to let you play with.
Alec blends the three sets of fragrant oils together to produce the finished perfume.
If you wave it around a bit to encourage the oxygen to accelerate the evaporation.
I didn't smell either of your two independently and this certainly smells very different from mine, when it's blended.
That's all right.
It's quite complex.
Let's compare.
Let's go for I've been looking forward to this all day.
Absolutely.
I think it's really funny you chaps are enjoying the perfume more than me.
All we need to do now is get that properly bottled and a nice label on it and start making some money out of it.
We can have different dilutions for different people.
Different classes.
Yes.
For you, we have the upper-class dilution.
Ruth is keen to find out if the Empress of India will be a hit with the ladies of the town.
Good morning.
Hello.
Ooh, hello.
Hello.
I wonder if you could help me.
I'm doing a bit of market research about perfume.
I love perfume.
Really? I do, yes.
That's a very fine bottle.
I do like that.
It's nice, isn't it? Let me know what you really think.
It's quite a potent one.
Have a little sniff and see what you think.
Ooh, yeah, it is, in't it? Strong, isn't it? It's quite strong.
It's lovely.
Yes.
It's quite flowery.
If I just pop just a tiny little bit on there.
Hmm! Oh! Ooh! It is a strong one, isn't it? Mm.
It's growing on me.
Well, that's a good sign.
Not nice, is it? Not nice.
I think it's more for you than for me.
One of the things the perfumier said to me was that it smells different on everybody.
Oh, it's beautiful.
Yes? It smells quite expensive.
It would have been expensive at the time.
In a Victorian period, you would begin to see perfume getting a little bit cheaper so people like school mistresses could afford, occasionally, a little bit of perfume.
I'm going to have some for Christmas.
You really think this something you would actually enjoy, that stand up against a modern perfume? Definitely - it's quite a strong powerful smell.
This is quite flowery which is lovely.
We were going to call it Empress of India.
What do you think about that? I think that sounds really royal and regal.
I like that.
Tom's finished photograph is ready for hanging.
Just had our photograph framed.
Really proud of it, actually.
It was such a long process to make - very much more involved than I imagined.
It was more painting a watercolour than anything else.
Very different to the "point and click" photography we do today.
The idea is we'll put this on the wall and people will come in and say, "Oh, that looks great.
How do I get to make something like that?" You see the shop and then us in the middle there, looking a little bit like ghosts.
Nick, Ruth and Tom have traced the evolution of the pharmacy through more than 60 years of Victoria's reign, reliving a revolution in public healthcare that put a chemist's shop in every town in Britain.
Today's modern pharmacy stocks a vast range of consumer goods - and this is a direct result of the entrepreneurial spirit of the Victorian pharmacists.
By the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the pharmacy was forever established as the High Street institution we know today.
I'm about finished back here.
How are you doing? Yeah, I think I'm pretty much done here.
Yeah.
Been a long journey, hasn't it? I'm never going to go into a pharmacy with the same eyes again.
Never.
You take it for granted.
It's one of those things that is always there.
Look at that.
That's rising.
I think I've value the skills and the experience and the expertise of pharmacists so much more than I did before we started.
The 19th Century - there's so many different things going on.
It is a place of scientific exploration, commercial development and all these different themes that you don't think about when you're going to a pharmacy.
Go on, Tilly, just for us.
I think I'll take away pride in the fact that chemists are a retail environment.
Here we have some.
That is not something to be ashamed of - it's something to be proud of.
Something which brought health to the masses in an accessible, effective way and it's something we should be proud of and celebrating.
APPLAUSE I suppose we'd better head off.
Leave this lovely place behind.
Right, well Sad to see it go, really.
It is.
I'll be very sad.
It'll be sad not being part of this Victorian world any more.
It is time to go, though, isn't it?