The Museum of Spanish Pharmacy is a university museum with more than sixty-five years of history located in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Complutense University of Madrid. It forms part of the university’s extensive historic-artistic and scientific technical heritage, and is one of the most important museums in terms of age, history and quality of collections housed. Although it was primarily created for teaching purposes, it now also offers guided tours to a diverse public searching for cultural enrichment. It receives more than four thousand visitors a year, who learn about the history of the pharmaceutical profession, the preparation of medicines, and the decorative arts, an area that has always gone hand in hand with the pharmaceutical trade. In spite of the limitations imposed by a low budget and a small staff, it is an active museum which continues to enlarge, conserve and restore its collection, while becoming ever more widely known through an ongoing participation in temporary exhibitions.
The museum is approximately seven hundred square meters in size and is housed on two floors, as well as having an additional space in two other buildings that make up the present faculty. The five original pharmacies, two dating back to the 18th century and three from the 19th century, are without a doubt the most striking exhibits, and are also supplemented by recreations of an Arabic pharmacy, an iatrochemistry laboratory, and a replica of a 17th century hospital pharmacy. The rest of the collection is made up of exhibits representing very different techniques and uses: paintings, sculptures and numerous display cabinets with 18th century medical material, pharmaceutical advertising, amulets, scientific instruments, mortars, apothecarial tools for preparing pharmaceutical compounds, ceramic and porcelain pharmaceutical jars, flasks and other glass utensils, wooden boxes, medicines, medicine chests and travel pharmacies, and much more, all totalling more than nine thousand objects that illustrate how medicines have been prepared, stored and dispensed throughout history.
