Why Victorian Contraception Was So Bizarre | Victorian Pharmacy EP4 | Absolute History

blist's hill victorian town in shropshire revives the sights sounds and smells of the 19th century 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 whoa 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 yeah the pharmacy was something that affected everybody's lives in one way or another they're discovering an age of social change that brought health care 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 barbara and 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 want 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 emphasize that sort of quality so they started dressing in a much more man-like way to emphasize 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 you know i think i could run the world of pharmacy dress 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 but 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's like a culmination it's up to this doesn't it and all of a sudden we have this scientific knowledge the the pharmacist has the expertise we're stocking branded products probably for the first time we're not making them ourselves anymore 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 thank you very much 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 [Music] okay okay i'll just check once more that we've got the focus right slide out we already watch the birdie keep still while we do it thank you very much we're done now later after terry has set up a dark room tom will be learning how to develop the photograph [Music] it's early spring and in the fields around barbara and goodman's shropshire pharmacy many medicinal plants are beginning to emerge nick and herbalist elena gallia are on the hunt for one of the most effective traditional painkillers so what's this plant for seeking meadow sweet philippens a beautiful name beautiful man i could marry someone call that and what was it used for digestive calming digestive very popular in rheumatism pain relief diaphoretic are used to help sweat out the early stages of a fever yeah i keep thinking i see little bits of it it's very small at the moment there's some here actually roll over here so the effects depend partly on the the time of year when it's picked and the obviously the parts of the plant which are picked and does that was that something which herbalists and chemists and druggers sort of paid attention to hugely very very important and especially so when traditionally the herbalists were collecting their own herbs and then dispensing their own herbs and making up their own tinctures and medicines so should we pick some meadow sweet then yes let's remembering all the time that this is just the very young growth and so this would help from diaphoresis and 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 the mucosa the alkali which actually protects the gut from the acid that's produced in the whole digestive process and we can make a 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 with a lid and that way yes very important and that way you uh you preserve any of the volatile oils oh right volatile coming from the voila to fly no really so the little oils they're all longing to fly away you give them hot water and off they go 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 sheeps 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 well 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 and then i've got to turn the whole thing inside out so that i can make sure that the inside is thoroughly cleaned um and it's then got to be macerated or sort of lightly worked and soaked in an alkali substance to sterilize it then i'm going to dry it out over brimstone sulfur fumes again we're trying to sterilize the whole thing and then i can start shaping it so alkali overnight and change the alkaline the morning condoms in one form or another had been available for centuries whether they were made a sheep go or after the vulcanization of rubber made of rubber they'd 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 [Music] keen to exploit every business opportunity in the 1890s pharmacies began offering another new service to their customers [Music] with only one qualified dentist for every eight and a half thousand people there was money to be made from tooth pulling retired dentist and dental historian professor stanley galbia has come to train tom up now what i don't understand stanley is as a pharmacist assistant why would i be extracting teeth well it's quite simple really because you're going to be one of a number of people who are extracting teeth at that particular time in the century in london many of them were surgeons who also did dentistry as almost as a sideline as you got outside london you had a variety of other people you had blacksmiths blacksmiths could make the tools in their forge and then they would actually use them but some were wig makers silversmiths a whole load of different people there must have been quite a a market for it i mean what state were victorian people's teeth in at this time well a lot of people had bad teeth the problem was sugar as always their mouths were often full of bad teeth they had pus training into their mouth through gumballs etc so it's 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 see how i go about this then so what would i be using here why don't we try out one of the keys which is that the brutally efficient dental key was the weapon of choice for extracting diseased teeth some of the earlier ones wouldn't have had a handle just a straight piece of metal and this is more sophisticated more comfortable you get a better grip why don't we try it out on your finger first um okay well there we are right we won't take your finger off and i'm just hooking it over so we can see that now and you'll feel as i slowly turn oh yeah feel the grip very tightly yes so we won't do any more right have a try okay try it on this so i need to go around the back here then well no you can't do that because that would be the back of the head and the throat so you need to go in through the mouth right okay which is the front get that gripping on the tooth oh right and then when you grip quick yank that's it wow yeah you can see how that would do quite a lot of damage that's right and more often not not in the tooth comes out sometimes the tooth breaks sometimes it comes straight out but 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 there was no anesthetics so it really was painful that's not a not friendly technology 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 dentifrees 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 dentifree switches what they use before they use toothpastes it's a powder mixture of various things which i'm 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 when soft metal tubes were made available in the about the 1890s that they could put toothpaste into these tubes and be able to have them sealed and used in the way which we're so used to now first thing i'm going to do is mix some chalk together with some peppermint oil some of the oris root this is a plant substance we've got some lumps in here because of the mixture of the oil and the um and the chalk sort of binds it together and makes it a bit lumpy we'll try and get rid of those but we will be sieving it before we give it out before we produce it in as a final product pharmacists would sometimes add ground cuttlefish brick dust and even crushed china to their tooth powders for extra abrasive effect we've got some soap flakes coming in as well and soap was used as you can imagine to clean the teeth but the art of mixing is extremely important there's no use having a dilution of something if you end up with a very concentrated part of it which is poisonous or dangerous in some ways i'm worried that it's going to be given to someone i'll be rubbing some of my own gums before i'm giving it to anyone else and that sense of responsibility was there all the time that's why that whole concept of checking is is so important in pharmacy you only have to make the sort of careless error we all make in other aspects of our life and you can severely harm someone but we're getting close to be ready to try it i'll try sieving down a small amount that's looking good hello helen how are you so this is what i'll be testing then it is indeed it isn't very kind of you to volunteer to uh 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 little pots and then you'd have a tooth brush i've got a lovely selection of toothbrushes here so you ready to give this a go yep well pick a toothbrush i'll have this one here nice and small and give it a try see how it's i don't know how much sticks on i have to say yeah it seems to stick quite well to the two all right good there we go all right here we go let me give it a try as well put some on my finger he's still standing that's a good start what's it like you can there's got to definitely zing to it hasn't it can feel the inside of my lips and my gums tingling that'll be the mirror doing that i'm just waiting to see if there's a secondary kick i can smell the peppermint it's definitely you can't taste it too much though no you can feel it sort of gritty on your your teeth as well i certainly can with my finger nice and clean using using the brush there yeah i think we might have a product here i've got a pot here for you to take away and a toothbrush thank you very much thanks very much indeed for coming in bye-bye bye [Music] nick is on his way to try out the natural pain killing plant meadow sweet that he and eleanor picked hello eleanor how are you perfect time when kettle's just boiling oh fantastic so any chance of some of this meadow sweet tea then for sure see what it was like being a a victorian taking a 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 there sent there by god so there's a an issue about it yes when they introduced chloroform for um to stop the pain of childbirth um there's a lot of religious leaders who were against it saying it was stopping god's work being done so there were quite a barrier to it and so the movement against it was uh it was quite strong you know people were saying this is against god's most way the natural products were that were used for pain control where their only natural products were basically opium and and cannabis and queen victoria had cannabis for her period pains what did the vicar say about that i don't know i think perhaps i didn't tell him fantastic thank you that's quite restorative it's 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 [Music] for thousands of years medicinal plants like meadow sweet and also willow had been used to control pain but by the end of the 19th century scientists had discovered that the plant's pain-killing properties were due to a chemical called salicylic acid and it could be extracted using the latest laboratory techniques by isolating salicylic acid from meadow sweet and willow they could produce a range of pain-killing medicines it is the key ingredient in modern non-prescription painkillers such as aspirin this is a source of salicylic acid willow bark oh right just from normal willow trees normal willow trees i'm that if you chew it it's quite bitter isn't it hippocrates 400 bc was prescribing an infusion of willow leaves not the bark because you can leave the use the leaves of the letter as well right to ease the pain of childbirth two and a half thousand years we've known that this is a painkiller yeah salicylic acid can reduce pain it also is antibiotic right so it reduces fever if you're hot and feverish it's anti-inflammatory right so things like rheumatism or where you've got the inflamed area of your your body your gums can be inflamed all sorts of areas yeah help treat that there's a bit of a wonder drug it well it's still used in things like um wart treatments it's used in strong concentrations to like 60 to burn off um warts the first step is to grind this back down if nick and scientist mike bullock can extract the salicylic acid from the willow bark then nick can make up painkillers to sell in the pharmacy having ground it is the next step they're going to get it out is to add some ether ether why are we using ether the ether is uh a solvent that will dissolve the salicylic acid and what i've got to do is just let this settle you see there's lots of little bits of dust in there which i'm allowed to settle and then i'll just tap off the uh the ether with the salicylic acid in fantastic [Music] as ruth is discovering making a sheep gut condom requires patience this is definitely changed in the alkali it's certainly bleached it it's much paler than it was and it seems to have loosened all the mucus membrane now the next thing i've got to do with it so it says is to sterilize well it's to smoke it in brimstone smoke it doesn't say what for i think it's to sterilize it so if i just stick this on the line for a minute there brimstone of course is sulfur so i went and got some of that out of the lab just plain old sulfur and i've got to burn it i also found in the lab this sort of victorian sort of smoke vessel so what i've got to do is make the smoke inside there with all of that hanging in there so the fumes that you get off sulfur are quite poisonous which is good in that it kills the bugs you just got to be careful it doesn't kill the people too while you're at it okay it's starting to look a bit more active isn't it there it goes lid on it's quite weird in there 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 them of an inappropriate size okay tied oh my goodness i don't want to do this bit [Music] i really don't want to do this bit i've got to inflate them it says so that they can dry to size that is just too weird for words hang it on the line and let it dry the 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 the only thing we haven't talked about is this instrument here right and i suppose this must be is it the treadle drive this is called a treadle drill till about 1870 you didn't even have this sort of drill and it works simply on the bases you're going to put your foot up and down on the dreddle this revolves comes right around here drives gears in there right down to the handpiece well this is skill getting it started it is indeed often if you twist that so you start that's off like that and that may get you going you've got to keep up the motion oh okay yeah there you go not even okay good you're doing well got to get your timing right on this sounds great so you've got to concentrate on that concentrate on your hand concentrate on the patient's mouth and also all the time trying to instill some sort of confidence in the patient i suppose isn't it you've got to think about so many things at once absolutely right i mean the thing is the faster you go the better it is because there's less vibration on the two all right well it's still quite a lot but trying to get a bit of speed up right got the speed that's good keep it up yeah and then slowly get that onto the tooth that's good the faster the better you can really get a kind of vicious isn't it that's it oh missed a little bit oh straight in great looking really professional now but you think of the vibration you can feel and the patient will feel it even more yeah right so terrible vibration right yeah now you can see the dust coming up feel it like a uh and of course you have to remember not to blow if it's a patient's nail yes that's a good point so yeah you have something called a chip syringe just to blow it and see how you just it's really difficult to be accurate though so go all over that place absolutely scratch sorry sir i've scratched your teeth and you're dealing with a patient who'll be moving around the whole time you've knocked the tooth out oh no it's like so it will get it'll just grow back sir but you get the idea ready right you know what it is brilliant having this done must have been quite expensive then indeed it was expensive so much so the poor people wouldn't have had fillings usually they just would have waited until they had awful toothache have a tooth taken out and that was it and indeed there were some people even had um perhaps a bit later in the century had teeth out for the 21st birthday particularly females and the idea was it had the teeth taken out before they got married and then there would be no expense for the future husband really yeah all the teeth gone that was the end of it oh wow so would you get dentures or well if you were poor no you didn't have dentures that was something for the middle classes and rich people had well thanks very much for your advice my pleasure um i think i might have another go on this you do so let me just don't let anyone know [Music] okay better to know you are yeah 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 like laying off the teeth because i really enjoyed using that trail [Music] in the lab nick and mike are extracting the pain-killing drug salicylic acid from the willow bark what's the stuff in the funnel there it's a little wad of cotton wool i'm passing the solutions through a little water cotton wall and that will filter off the uh the fibers or any fibers that are suspended in the in the ether solution but what's for coming through the the filter funnel is should be an ether solution of salicylic acid and other things and the next step is getting rid of those other things so we're left with as pure salicylic acid as possible so do you think this would have been worth it for the pharmacist in terms of the the cost and the the ingredients and stuff and the the sort of the yield of salicylic acid they get out well the yield's really low i suspect we don't we're going to get a very low yield right don't expect too much but yeah i think it would have been perhaps economical if you had the time yeah because the willow bark is free yeah yeah it takes time and patience doesn't it no like life take your time [Music] okay so it goes 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 so if i give it a good shake let's just get the two layers and mix it up as much as you possibly can the two layers are separated out perfect then mike adds dilute sulfuric acid to turn the salt into solid salicylic acid so whoa see that's neutralizing the sodium carbonate and converting it back to acid you see it's changing the color and you see that white solid coming down yeah absolutely now that salicylic acid that's forming you can see yeah the white house is solid so it's not looking uh not looking too bad at the moment which is heartening that we've got some salicylic acid it's amazing just three or four stages we're going from pieces of plant all the way through to a pure chemical kind of pure care 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 leorid 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 the illegal and considered to be immoral and against the teachings of the church and huge social pressure against that sort of knowledge it was quite suppressed it was also of course very dangerous taking totally unregarded amounts of things that are toxic in your system people got into a terrible state an awful lot of women died trying to induce 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 pharmacist a universal dish may not sound much but it is in fact one of the first widely available forms of contraception you never know would you from the packaging it's very very carefully general it says universal douche for directions see inside lid and 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 vaginal dish but the hygiene of keeping the vagina clean you have sort of 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 sort of a discretionary trade one amongst gentlemen people really wouldn't appreciate um 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 and really you know there's two things it's 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 [Music] in a time when most people walked everywhere relief from foot pain was in high demand local businessman richard ely 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 yeah you can sort of see a sore area yeah the pain goes from my little toe up to my knee to the point where i have considered having my little toe amputated [Music] 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 invented thought was going to transform the care was salicylic acid oh salicylic acid and in fact i've got well actually this is a modern preparation of salicylic acid um so there's a little a few other things in here to sort of carry the acid and you could have it in a liquid form or you could have it put on little corn plasters that you applied yes you get a little tin you know with some medicated corn plasters right so it's just just at the side of the nose just there yeah that little area there we go and then that should sort of whiten as it dries you get a sort of skin over it which sort of holds the active ingredient against the affected part so it does actually burn the skin away yeah it sort of slowly kills the whole area and that allows the the virus basically to be lifted out so now you see it now you see it no you don't basically you take that away and um i drop every day on the same spot drop every day keeps the corn away that's 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 hey nick is your salicylic acid oh fantastic mate well done last time he saw it it was in a filter funnel and it looked like that yeah i said i'd purify it by recrystallizing it right that was the result they're fantastic oh yeah really long needles well you wanted it really pure yeah so i took that the needles and recrystallized them what ended up is really pure needles which i've ground up yeah that's it so there's your pure salicylic acid fantastic what i'm going to do is stick them in these caches i'm going to have to mix that it'd be such a small amount in each one i'm going to mix it with something which is okay to swallow like citric acid grind them together they make a nice mixture and then we just put an amount in each of these caches and then we put the other half in this close it up and they stick together you know those sweets like flying saucers they are called like or spaceships yeah absolutely two halves of rice paper with some sherbet in the middle used to stick them in your mouth and it needs to dissolve and the sherbet will be released because this rice paper is you know as you know once it gets wet and a bit of acid on it it will fall apart and release the powder one more diffraction oh well well there you are don't use either of those because they're in pure yep that's what you work with brilliant thanks very much mate see you later [Music] see how this goes this will be the top half of each cache they're quite delicate so i'm a bit worried about cracking them i don't quite know how far to press them in they're quite a tight fit fingers crossed there's a dampness there press these down and hope that's all we can do at this stage and now fingers crossed yay look at that fantastic and 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 caches holding together you can hear the powder inside you know the what we've been through is just um a remarkable process really which doesn't happen nowadays it's the sort of thing which everything's manufactured and standardized and so on but we started with willow bark a natural product and we 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 the chemically altered version of it with less side effects was released onto the market whatever the content caches allowed pharmacists to dispense a pre-measured dose the practical problem for the patient is swallowing them student tom chandler has volunteered to try one out has put inside two halves the text of the time say just take it down like an oyster okay is there any more advice than that you can give me if you're not an oyster eater it's not very helpful but i think you're gonna have to work it out for yourself you're willing to give it a go yeah yeah okay um so so dunk it in the water okay just get a bit wet that's it so yeah okay yep then in your mouth back of the tongue okay and swing it down swallow it oh it feels like it's stuck about here oh my goodness it's big isn't it yeah you can get a modern tablet at that time but as it softens with the water and the moisture of your 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 i think it's about here so it's slightly lower we'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 was stuck and then it just sort of physically knocks it down into the into the stomach there we go and then it dissolves there and releases the drug and then kills your headache hopefully thank you very much i bet you're glad science has moved on and now we have aspirin tablets oh yes i'm so glad little small things rather than those yeah that's it photographer terry king has set up a dark room in the lab tom is about to learn that the life of an amateur photographer could be hazardous okay terry we've taken a photograph what do we do next well what we have to do now is to develop the photograph and things have changed uh in the 18 late 1880s things became a lot safer but before that say in the 1870s 1860s the the plates would have been covered with something called collodion to hold the silver solutions and collodium was actually made out of gun cotton you know the stuff that goes bang in dissolved in ether which makes you go to sleep and they 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 safe a lot more safely and it's the sort of stuff that we'd be selling a lot more in fact it was even so safe that people used to do it on the kitchen table right 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 okay 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 [Music] there we go here we go so is this the moment of truth the moment of truth let's see if we've got something on it here we are oh wow i think that's pretty good don't you great okay it's nice that's quite good then wow i think that i think we should feel fairly pleased with ourselves great so do we need to hang this up then let's hang it up okay should i hold this here okay right on the edge yeah live okay 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 pharmacist's expertise with chemicals left them well placed to take advantage of this consumer boom perfumia alec lawless is going to give ruth a lesson in perfume making you brought some amazing stuff in here alec this is things from the perfume years trade yeah things for making perfumes and i suppose in the earlier periods perfume was very much the reserve of the super rich yes yes and then that changes now it changes dramatically what characterized this age was the beginning of mass production and branding you could you could sell an odor cologne and nobody was going to say you can't call that an oda cologne and so there were several perfumes like that one was called jockey club there was another one called mule fleur right and then another one called new moon hay so basically these names became known as perfume the other thing was that the pharmacist because they'd been university trained and they they liked experimenting and they had this whole cornucopia and a lot of the things that were used in apothecaries for medicine were also perfume you know most of the things we've got a draw full of nerves that are over there there you go many of these are sort of ingredients that we'd have medicinally in the pharmacy anyway how easy would it be for us to sort of be a 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 could you give us some advice on how to make our own then 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 um and that would tie in very nicely with um parts of the empire india i mean this is east indian sandalwood finest um 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 impressive i have to say it sounds a lot nicer than jockey club now all we've got to decide is how to make it smell nice well 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 from mysore so we're going to use both of those because we want our perfume to be really passionate but also relatively cheap to make that we can sell for a high profit good point okay well we can put some other things we're going to put coriander in there oh that sounds cheaper a really nice little top note yeah daft thing is you know when i said i was doing this the boys want to have a go too boys and perfume yeah nick and tom both have a guy too we thought we might sort of you know all have a go why don't we split the perfume into top notes middle notes and bass notes and then each of you can have a play around and come up with the combination for each of those that you like the best okay i'll have a go with that pharmacists were creating perfumes because they had raw materials there they had the plant products the aromatic products the essences and also they needed to make money some money to deposit thank you if you look in the chemist and druggists of the time you'll see you know whole pages of bankruptcies and so on it was a an expensive thing to be and you need to stock your shop needed to buy the shop or rent it and so on so they had a lot of outgoings and they needed the income to keep going as well so they were diversifying into any areas to do with their knowledge to do with the 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 in the lab thomas 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 a light-sensitive chemical potassium dichromate and a colored 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 um i don't know making it almost a paint isn't it yeah that's right this is the sort of thing that amateur photographers will be doing well what was happening was that all the amateur photographers had got mr mr kodak and mr george eastman but all the posh people thought oh dear all these nasty lower orders are making photographs and we've got to do something more arty and this was a way of making photographs look like paintings which is essentially a photographic watercolor what we need to do now tom is for you this time to coat the paper okay ready ready off you go that's it continued yes then that's it it really is just like painting isn't it it's amazing as i say it's just like just like painting a right 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 is absolutely central to so many different activities in the late 19th century isn't it i mean well yeah and right from the beginning it was everything from military spying taking photographs from balloons practically any activity human negativity 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 watercolor the popularity of this artistic method with wealthier photographers added to the pharmacy's already lucrative photographic business i can now remove the glass and the negative and there we go there we go there we have an image and what we want to do now is to wash away the softer parts so that we get uh an image with more contrast many of the developments in photography actually came from pharmacists so pharmacists are sort of they're involved with the technology they were developing and all these different things and it's the sort of thing maybe i don't know if you're really good at this particular side of the pharmacy business do you think you could set up on your own maybe oh 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 right 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 perfumers 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 perfumia alec lawless has given tom the job of making up the long lasting bass note it seems like two of these are a lot stronger than the other three yes and i was wondering like if i'm sort of making is it the bass note yes yeah what's the idea is it these things are the most tenacious and the reason for that is that they're heavier molecules and either the top or the middle notes okay yeah so they're going to [ __ ] the evaporation of the perfume okay so it's the sort of piece that comes out last basically yeah that's exactly right this will be what's left on the skin now all of these nick has been entrusted with the most expensive ingredients the smell is so intense yeah it's sort of driving out anything okay these are the middle notes so it's a floral heart the main personality of the perfume and these these guys are really expensive right the powerful fragrances are proving a little too much for ruth the lady is very sensitive and dead told me these were not overpowering you lied they are real sorry okay well you're obviously incredibly sad well i smell all four of them first by which time my nose was beginning to burn yeah okay and then i thought well the one that i liked best still was the bergamot oil so i put more of that in and you'd mentioned that the lemon the lime was particularly strong so i put least of that in yes i'm going to um i'm going to go for that one i'm going to smell it then okay so they're still being masked for those that's the thing you have to get somewhere where there isn't already a smell that's very orangey isn't it 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 this some sort of structure these would be blended roughly i'm going to do 50 of it's going to be the floral heart the number two 20 the top notes and 30 percent right the base notes just as a rule of thumb and i'm also going to put some musk in there and one or two other things well they were too expensive to let you play with it alec blends the three sets of fragrant oils together to produce the finished perfume [Music] so if you wave it around a bit to encourage the oxygen to accelerate the evaporation i mean i didn't smell either of your two independently and this certainly smells very different from minded when it's blended that's all right it's quite complex let's compare let's go for it i'm looking forward to this all day though yes absolutely i think it's really funny it's you chaps are enjoying the perfume more than me i think all we need to do now is get that properly bottled and a nice label on it and then start making some money out of it exactly different dilutions for different people yeah different classes that's right and 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 oh hello hello um i wonder if you could help me i'm doing a little bit of market research about perfume yeah i love perfect really i do yeah yeah yeah fine bottles yeah it's nice isn't it let me know what you really think it's quite a potent one so just tell a little sniff and see what you think oh yeah it isn't it it's quite strong yeah oh it's lovely yeah it's quite flowery if i just pop just a tiny little bit on there yep oh oh it is a strong one isn't it it's growing on me well that's a good sign um nice is it not nice i think it's more for you than for me one of the things that perfume was saying to me was that it smells different on everybody yes oh it's beautiful yeah yeah it smells quite expensive yeah expensive at the time in the victorian period you begin to see perfumes getting a little bit cheaper so that people like school mistresses could afford occasionally a little bit of perfume i'm going to have some for christmas i think you really think this is something that you would actually enjoy that would stand up against a modern perfume oh definitely it's quite a strong powerful smell yes and it's quite flowery which is lovely we were going to call it empress of india what do you think about that as a name i think that sounds really royal and regal i like that [Music] just had a photograph framed really proud of it actually and it's it's such a long process to make or very much more involved than i imagined it was more sort of painting a watercolour than anything else i mean very different to sort of point-and-click cameras photography we do today i mean the idea is we'll put this on the wall and people come in and say oh that's that looks great how did you you know how do i get to make something like that see the shop and then i was in the middle there looking a little bit like ghosts you know yeah 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 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 i mean you take it for granted it's one of those things that's always there oh wow wow that's rising i think i value the skills and the experience and the expertise of pharmacists so much more than i did before we started [Music] the 19th century there's so many different things going on you know it's a place of scientific exploration and commercial development and all these different themes that you don't think about when you just go into the pharmacy go on tilly just for us i think i'll take away pride in the fact that chemists are a retail environments here we have some and that's not something to be ashamed of it's something to be proud of it's something which brought health to the masses in an accessible effective way and it's something we should be proud of and celebrating i suppose we better head off there yep leave this lovely place behind all right well it's sad to see it go really it is it is i'll be very sad envy says not being part of this victorian world anymore i think it is time to go though isn't it [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 803,302

Rating: 4.8512716 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history, british history, living in britain, ruth goodman, nick barber, tom quick, victorian pharmacy, weird pharmacy, ancient cures, victorian cures, pharmacy history, potions, health and safety, victorian era, 19 century

Id: rhR8hV9ljdw

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020