Victorian Farm

Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire

revives the sights, sounds and smells of the 19th century.

Morning. 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, Ruth Goodman, Nick Barber

and Tom Quick are opening the doors to the Victorian pharmacy,

recreating a high-street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea.

How can I help?

They'll bring the pharmacy to life, sourcing ingredients, mixing potions and dispensing cures.

But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic

and cold cures were made from opium, the team will need to be highly selective.

They'll only make safe versions of traditional remedies

and try them out on carefully selected customers.

The start was like the Wild West.

People didn't know what was good and bad. Try and 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'll discover an age of social transformation 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.

The Victorian pharmacy opens its doors in 1837,

the year when the teenage Queen Victoria ascended the throne.

Wow, look at this place!

This is fantastic.

Ooh, that smell! It's much bigger than I thought it would be.

There's a heck of a lot of stuff here, isn't there?

There's a tremendous amount of stuff.

Fresh from her time on the Victorian farm, Ruth Goodman will now be

applying her skills in new areas, from medicines to cosmetics.

As a domestic historian, she knows just how important the pharmacy was to ordinary people.

Doctors were expensive. Really, on a day-to-day basis, only the rich were using doctors.

Occasionally a poor person might be able to save up for a consultation,

maybe a doctor might offer some free consultation, but in general

most people in the 19th century turned to the pharmacist

for the majority of their healthcare.

Oh!

It's a beautiful place to be in, we're going to be able to make this work really well.

Nick Barber is professor of the practice of pharmacy

at the University of London's School of Pharmacy.

Parrot Brand polishing soap and Monkey Brand.

Things like Sloan's Liniment, which people use nowadays, and Zam-Buk.

As the pharmacist, he will be responsible for recommending

and preparing all the remedies and medicines that his shop dispenses.

It's a unique opportunity for Nick to learn how his profession evolved.

It's a fantastic chance to recreate what it was like to be

a Victorian pharmacist at a time when pharmacy was completely different to how it is today.

Pharmacists were creating new things, lots of innovation happening then, the growth of chemistry

and pharmacists were experimenting and developing new sorts of treatments as well.

We're going to have fun with this!

I'm going to see how this sign's getting on. OK, see you.

There's old pill-rolling devices here.

Look at these liquids up here, this is a tincture of zingib.

No Victorian pharmacy would be complete without an apprentice.

And these are all the Latin names I'm going to have to know about.

That job falls to Tom Quick.

A PhD student in the history of medicine, he's hoping to put theory into practice.

The natural products were all in their Latin names.

And so much equipment as well, right?

It's remarkable, isn't it?

Really, what I think of as history isn't about just seeing things behind glass cases.

It's about people's lives and what people did on a day-to-day basis.

We've got all the kit here, which was all needed in those days. We've got, erm...

We've the balance there, right?

Yeah, you'd be weighing things out carefully.

You know, careful being the key word, because you killed people if you got these things wrong.

Some of these things I was taught when I was an undergraduate, but I've never used them professionally.

So actually to do these sorts of things, to go back to mixing,

to pounding, to compounding things is an enormous challenge.

The front of shop is where they will come face to face with the public.

In the early Victorian age, new ideas on how to treat illness

were beginning to filter through to the high street,

but in this moment of change from traditional to scientific medicine,

many of the cures the pharmacy will sell

are based on old beliefs and remedies.

Poison of lance headed viper. Oh, my giddy.

In 1837, despite the dangerous products on the shelves,

anyone could trade as a pharmacist.

Even grocers were setting up as chemists.

Hee-hee, look at that!

Wow!

That looks so good. It's just fantastic to see your name above a shop like that.

Yeah... You'd want a good standing within the community to be a pharmacist.

It was a hub of the town, really, and people used to come here...

Everybody's ill, everybody comes to the pharmacy.

Opening a new shop was a massive investment, and pharmacists needed to be entrepreneurs to survive.

Marketing was everything.

Like many of their predecessors,

the new Barber & Goodman pharmacy is having a grand opening.

"Blaze Away"

In order to understand how people responded to 19th century remedies,

Barber & Goodman will dispense authentic but safe Victorian medicines

to carefully chosen volunteers.

The pharmacy's first customer is Sue Dodd, who has worked as a nurse for 35 years.

Hello, Mr Barber.

I have a very bad cough, is there anything that you can help?

Well, have you tried modern cures for a cold? Do you think they work?

Some do, although you can't beat natural local honey and lemon for sore throats.

Generally things like that.

Well, in Victorian times what we'd have given you

is Dr John Collis Browne's Chlorodyne.

I've got the Chlorodyne here.

It was invented when he was an Indian army doctor for cholera.

It didn't treat cholera, but it became a very popular treatment for

coughs, colds, chests and things like this. It's got in chloroform,

it's got, er...opium in it and it's got cannabis in it.

Why would they put those things in?

Well, it makes people feel better, as you might imagine.

Many pharmacists made up their own versions of Chlorodyne,

but the high opiate content made these medicines addictive, and death from overdose was a real risk.

Collis Browne's mixture is still on sale today, but with a low, non-addictive dose of morphine.

Opium suppresses cough, so if people do have troublesome coughs, then it would help bring that down.

We'll knock out something for you which is a bit safer.

And will it have the opium and things like that in?

No, we'll find one without those sorts of things. Oh, good!

Just natural herbs we'll use for this one. That sounds wonderful.

Before his customer returns for her authentic Victorian cough medicine,

Nick will need to find a less risky recipe.

Horehound and aniseed. Try that, see what that looks like.

Balsam of horehound and aniseed. That's it, so what have we got in?

Paregoric elixir...

The chemist's bible was the Pharmacopoeia,

which listed all the remedies and potions of the day.

The one we can't use, definitely, is paregoric,

and paregoric is camphorated opium, it's a form of opium, so again we've got the morphine in.

So we need to take that balsam of horehound and aniseed and try and reformulate it

using current knowledge and using things which are a bit safer than some of the ingredients.

My goodness, it's gorgeous at this time of year. Isn't it?

Nick's chosen remedy, balsam of horehound, was made up largely of natural herbs and flowers.

Cleavers, this is what we're after, yeah? Perfect, exactly.

The job of sourcing the essential ingredients falls to Ruth and herbalist Eleanor Gallia.

Eleanor is an expert in plant medicine.

A Victorian pharmacist would have needed her knowledge of the natural world.

So why do we want cleavers in a cough medicine, then?

They're the most wonderful immune stimulant, and they're very cleansing for the body.

With respiratory catarrh conditions, the first thing you need to do is

encourage the phlegm away from the chest,

so the body is very good at cleansing itself and draining itself.

A pharmacy needed to maintain a healthy stock of medicinal plants.

So do we need anything else, as well as the cleavers, while we're out.

Plantain. Oh, that's quite a common thing.

The surrounding countryside was a valuable and free resource.

They like to be stood on, planted into the ground.

While Ruth is gathering the ingredients for the cough medicine,

at the back of the shop, Nick and Tom open up the pharmacy's laboratory.

Wow! Look at this place.

This is going to be amazing, isn't it?

The nerve centre of their business, this is where the pharmacist would

experiment with new cures and manufacture drugs and potions.

It's halfway between an alchemist's cave and a kitchen and a storeroom and all sorts, really.

Yeah, this is a really interesting space for me.

This is the place that probably changed the most dramatically

over the time period we're looking at, 1840s - '50s.

This is kind of like a kitchen, right?

You've got all these ingredients over here, these sort of herbal things.

And you'd be here at the bench, making your latest concoction to sell in the shop.

Yes, to sell to the lucky public out there.

But by the end of the century, this is kind of more a place of chemical experimentation.

We've even got a hammer for pounding the herbs.

What I hope to learn is some of the techniques

which Victorian pharmacists used to use, the manual skills which some of us have forgotten.

I also hope to learn some of the different sorts of approaches which they had to medicine in those days.

The industrial revolution was at its height and half the population of Britain lived in towns.

Overcrowding, poor sanitation and grinding poverty left many people vulnerable to disease.

Hundreds of thousands died in the crowded, sewage-ridden cities.

But Victorians had only the haziest of ideas about what caused illness or how to treat it.

And so they often fell back on traditional remedies...

as Nick is about to discover as he prepares a bruise medicine made from earthworms.

Well, I didn't think I'd be doing this when I was doing a Victorian remedy -

digging, rather bizarrely, for earthworms.

Earthworms were part of an old remedy which was around

before Victorian times, from medieval times, really,

in which people would

take the earthworm and they would boil up earthworms

with olive oil and some form of wine

into oil of earthworms, which they put on bruises.

Here's one.

Another one to add to my haul.

There must be easier ways to treat bruises than this.

Customers would often ask a pharmacist to make up favourite traditional remedies like this.

You can always say, if people believe in things, then things do work.

The power of belief on health is very great.

Oil of Earthworm - who would have thought that was a Victorian recipe?

It's obviously something that has come from long before, an old idea, one of those things

that has hung on into the early part of the Victorian medical experience.

In the proper recipe we use real earthworms and boil them in oil.

But, in the interest of worm welfare, we're not going to do that.

We're going to use these dried worms, exactly the same species, which we've obtained.

In the pharmacy at this time, you took things which were whole

and you had to break them up by physical force.

I've always been fond of earthworms.

Charles Darwin spent a lot of his life studying them.

And I think he'd be upset by this.

I don't think the worms would have been any use at all in their bruise.

I think probably

it just came from the old days when people saw things that looked similar and related them.

So, for example, the skin of an earthworm,

when you take it out of the soil, does look a bit like a bruise.

They didn't understand what a bruise was as we do now, of course.

In those days, there wasn't much science around,