Long Night of Museums at the Pharmacy Museum in Łódź
On May 20th 2017, several thousand people visited the Jan Muszyński Pharmacy Museum in Łódź during the Long Night of Museums.
The Museum has participated in this international project since 2011. This year, in addition to the permanent collection of antique apothecary furniture and exhibits, the visitors had the opportunity to see an exhibition of photographs showing the history of Plac Wolności (the Liberty Square) in Łódź. Students of the Pharmacy Faculty of the Medical University of Łódź did special demonstrations of how prescription drugs are prepared.
About the Museum
The Jan Muszyński Pharmacy Museum was established in 2008 on the initiative of Pelion to show the Company’s respect and recognition for the centuries-long tradition of Polish pharmacy.
The museum is located in a historic townhouse at Pl. Wolności 2 in Łódź, where the history of pharmacy in Łódź began in 1830 and where the longest-running Łódź pharmacy has been open for business ever since. The history of the Museum is inseparably intertwined with the history of Łódź’s development and its birth as an industrial city.
The Museum’s interiors hark back to the times when Łódź was one of the fastest-growing industrial centres in Congress Poland. In the Museum one can admire meticulously reconstructed interiors of pharmacies from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The collection of precious exhibits documenting the tradition of Polish pharmacy includes antique pharmacy furniture, vessels for storing medications, instruments for making various forms of drugs, and old prescriptions. The Museum also has a collection of dispensing balances and laboratory scales, cast iron and porcelain mortars, and a well-stocked library with a collection of old pharmacopoeias, calendars, and pharmacy magazines.
The Museum serves as an educational, scientific and research centre and is also a venue for exhibitions devoted to pharmacy and its history, the pharmacist profession, and pharmacists who played a major role in the development of pharmacy. The Museum works with numerous regional and nationwide institutions and organisations, as well as cultural and educational establishments. The youngest visitors can take part in classes devoted to ancient methods of drug-making and can learn about the history of Łódź and the pharmaceutical industry.
The Museum is named after professor Jan Muszyński, who was one of the founders and the first dean of the Pharmacy Department in Łódź, the Chair of Pharmacognosy, a youth educator, a pioneer of herbalism in Poland, and a populariser of the history of pharmacy.
The support offered to the Pharmacy Museum by Pelion is just one example of how the Company cares about cultivating the traditions of Polish pharmacy. The Company also publishes monographs on Poland’s historic pharmacies − to date, it has published more than a dozen books under a series entitled “Poland’s most famous pharmacies”. Cultivating the traditions of Polish pharmacy is one of the pillars of Pelion’s Corporate Social Responsibility programme.
For current events and detailed information on the history and activities of the Museum, visit:
