"An art to cure": Pharmacy in Caricatures
Lecture on Monday 3rd March 2025 at 2:15PM
Lecturer: Briony Hudson
Venue: Larruperz Centre
The lecture will be preceded by the AGM.
Medical practitioners, their treatments and the diseases they were tackling were all portrayed in caricatures of the 18th and 19th century.
Taking some of the best examples from British collections, created by artists including William Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, this lecture examines the depiction of apothecaries, pharmacists, quack medicines and illnesses in the period. Come prepared to laugh and wince in equal measure.
Briony studied History at Cambridge University, and Museums Studies at Leicester University. Having worked at museums as diverse as Hereford Cider Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Wakefield Museum, she moved into medical history in 2002 as Keeper of the Museum Collections at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, then Director of Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons in England, and has worked as an independent curator for a wide range of medical museums and royal colleges. Her publications include books on liquorice, English delftware drug jars, popular historical medicines, and the histories of UCL, Cardiff and Sunderland schools of pharmacy. She is a Past President of the Social History Curators Group, of the London Museums of Health and Medicine network, of the British Society for the History of Pharmacy, and of the Faculty of the History and Philosophy of Medicine and Pharmacy at the Society of Apothecaries. She currently works part-time as Director of Amersham Museum.