Triolet French Drugstore (Pharmacy Museum)

Description

The Pharmaceutical Museum in Matanzas preserves and treasures Dr. Ernesto Triolet’s French Drugstore, founded on the 1st of January 1882 at Arms Square, currently Place of Liberty, in Matanzas. The drugstore was founded by pharmacists Don Juan Fermín de Figueroa, Cuban, and French Ernesto Triolet Lelievre. The pharmacy worked as such until January 16, 1964, and in May it was inaugurated as the first Latin American Pharmaceutical Museum.

The museum exhibition halls correspond to the former working areas in the drugstore in the ground floor of a three-story construction, built for the pharmacy. One of the two mezzanines was used as a studio by Celia Triolet Figueroa, artist and daughter of the founder of the drugstore. The other was used as the administrative office of the drugstore and today is the Museum’s Director Office. The Triolet-Figueroa family residence was in the second floor and the third level was occupied by the laboratory of Dr. Ernesto Triolet Lelievre and also used to dry the herbs to prepare medicines.

The Museum has a library specialized in disciplines related to pharmaceutical work including very old books, in several languages, on Pharmacy, Medicine, Chemistry and Botany among other sciences. The Herbarium contains species of plants that had been collected in many other countries.

Hundreds of glass bottles and vials with original products are exhibited in the shelves, as well as a collection of albarelli (earthenware jars) awarded a Gold Medal in the Paris Exhibition in 1847 that still contain the products indicated by the label, handmade using gold powders and mineral dyes.

Particularly outstanding is the Document Collection of Recipes and Prescriptions, which records day by day the prescriptions and preparations made in the French Drugstore from the 1st of January, 1882 to January 16, 1964 more than a half million formulae prepared in the pharmacy, documents of exceptional heritage value. These specific collection was deemed particularly important and therefore was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Registry.

There are also products and medical drugs imported from several countries like France, Germany, England, Spain, Russia, China, Italy and the United States together with other drugs made in Cuban pharmaceutical laboratories like Sarrá, Taquechel, Johnson, Ortega, Nodarse and Figueroa. The institution exhibits products made in the Drugstore such as tinctures, liquid extracts, balsams waters, wines, unguents, powders or ointments, pomades and cerates, as well as instruments dating from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

The pharmacy has preserved a label chest of 150 drawers made of cedar wood, with the labels for the prescriptions prepared in the French Drugstore of Dr. Ernesto Triolet. This unique collection includes more than 800 labels classified in more than 900 different types. The labels are exquisitely beautiful, diversely designed and painstakingly made by hand, and are exhibited next to the products registered and licensed by Dr. Triolet to be presented in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900, where he was awarded a Gold Medal.

The first public telephone booth the city of Matanzas had was installed by the doorway of the French Drugstore, where it can be seen today, as well as a bicycle from before 1890, with wood wheels and solid tyres that used messengers to home deliver medicine; this bike is the only one in Cuba and a rarity in the world.

Justification of Outstanding Universal Value

The Pharmaceutical Museum in Matanzas safeguards the only original and complete French drugstore of the end of the 19th century existing in the world. Its collections, therefore, are of exceptional and outstanding heritage value.

The French Drugstore provided excellence services for more than 82 years, during which the original building, specifically built to be a pharmacy, was preserved, as were preserved all the prescriptions, instructions and procedures for the pharmaceutical preparations, most of them using natural products, as well as the methods, instruments and utensils employed.

Dr. Ernesto Triolet’s French Drugstore has a very special place in the history of Matanzas. Dr. María Dolores de Figueroa y Marty, owner of the pharmacy for more than 40 years, was the first woman pharmacist in Cuba. She graduated from the New York School of Pharmacy with a dissertation on the Analysis and Description of the properties of the water springs at Ciego Montero.

The excellent conservation conditions of a French Drugstore of the end of the 19th century, as well as all the instruments, utensils and documentation, was the main reason for the creation of the first Pharmaceutical Museum in Latin America.

Dr. Ernesto Triolet’s French Drugstore has outstanding universal value as it preserves both tangible and intangible evidence of best practices for obtaining and using medicines and drugs of natural origin, pillars on which all the research on natural totally innocuous products and their manufacture are based; and for the high acceptance of those who use their productions.

Criterion (ii): The pharmacy presents the most advanced technology of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in terms of instruments, different types of weighs, alembics (distillation instruments), percolators (filters), lixiviators (leachers), mortars, press, measuring cups, pill rollers, moulds to make wafers and y suppositories, various types of pill rollers, cork press, several jars of glass and porcelain, Championer vaporizers, scarifiers, syringes of glass, metal and Bakelite, syphon bottles, autoclaves, oxygen generators, electrocardiograph, gynaecology-obstetric instruments such as forceps, separators and speculums, among others. The collections in the Museum depict the gradual development of serum therapy and the various equipment used throughout time to administer them, either subcutaneous or intravenous.

Criterion (iii): The Museum is an exceptional witness of the efforts made by men to obtain medical drugs from nature, from plants, animals or minerals to prevent diseases, or relieve pain. Everything is preserved in the Prescription Books, a half million prescriptions and formulae. Such documentation has already been inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, which favours dissemination of the information to individuals and institutions focused on the study and revitalization of Natural and Traditional Medicine.

Criterion (iv): The Pharmaceutical Museum in Matanzas is an outstanding example of a technological complex that shows the work of man to perfect medical-pharmaceutical practices, and of the evolution of the drugstore into a pharmacy as result of technological and scientific developments and how it paved the way for the development of sciences like Pharmacology. The study of the treasures in the library, of its documents, and the study of the prescriptions and preparations explains how such evolution occurred and how its theoretical and practical foundations were established.

Criterion (v): Analysing the methods applied in Dr. Ernesto Triolet’s French Drugstore, today Pharmaceutical Museum in Matanzas, to obtain drugs or the components for medicines, the interaction between man and the natural environment becomes evident. It was precisely in the natural environment where the supplies to prepare the formulae and prescriptions for more than a century were found. Prescriptions were made mostly using plants, animals or minerals, or products obtained from them.

Many of those products are found today in the Pharmacy, namely belladonna, valerian, ipecacuanha, coca, linden flowers, sunflower seeds, sturgeon tail, cod liver oil, ladybird, scorpion oil, ant syrup, sulphur, iron, lime water, Jibá root, Malambo bark (a variety of canella), tapioca of Brazil, digital, powders of the mummy of Aleppo, and hundreds of thousands of products that proof sustainability of a traditional relationship with the environment or dependence from the environment.

Criterion (vi): The use of Traditional and Natural Medicine is a universal trend to which the collections at the Pharmaceutical Museum in Matanzas is closely related. There are multiple references to the use of natural medicine, to how plants and products are collected and processed, to applications and to many other aspects. Preserved in the pharmacy is all the documentation, the instruments, even the preparations that everywhere in the world are being reclaimed because of their beneficial effects comparable to the benefits of synthetic or allopathic medicine.

Statements of authenticity and/or integrity

Everything in the Drugstore is original from the time when I was working as a pharmacy-drugstore, or belonged to the original owners. The collections are complete and correspond to the collections in a French Drugstore dating from the end of the 19th century in full splendour. Furthermore, the collections show the evolution and development of Medical-Pharmaceutical Sciences. All the pharmaceutical products in the Drugstore are original, either obtained locally or brought from other laboratories in Cuba or abroad and are in the original containers in which they were stored as base products or prepared formulae.

Comparison with other similar properties

In Cuba and other countries, there are Pharmaceutical Museums that exhibit artefacts from different periods in history. However, most of them had been part of an old drugstore, or have been established or created just for the purpose of protection, in places where a drugstore, a laboratory or a pharmacy had existed. Dr. Ernesto Triolet’s French Drugstore is different from other museum because it is an original Drugstore turned into a Museum preserving the characteristics of the late 19th century, and has maintained the original structure of the building, as it was designed for a drugstore as well as all the furniture, instruments and artefacts.

The Museum treasures hundreds of thousands of artefacts of heritage value, including documents; furniture, shelves and cupboards, all made of Cuban precious woods; all pots and jars (thousands) are either French porcelain, Bohemian or Baccarat glass or made in the United States; and all marble artefacts or containers were brought from Carrara, Italy.

The collection of prescriptions in the Logbook of Prescriptions treasures the outstanding work of three Cuban pharmacies from the 19th century to the 20th century (1873 - 1964). The collection includes 61 volumes of more than half a million formulae prepared at drugstores San Rafael, Nuestra Señora de Regla and La Francesa. The records are written day by day, with the number of the formula or prescription, the last name of the physician prescribing, precise composition, price, date, and in some cases the name of the patient or institution for which the prescription had been prepared. All these documents have been included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Registry.

Through the study of these remarkable documents is possible to establish the origin and development of the Cuban Drugstore and Pharmacy, as it is foundation of such science based on the permanent interaction of the druggist or pharmacist with nature and its benefits in obtaining products to prevent diseases or fight them and attain healing. An example is the international recognition achieved by eleven products registered and patented by Dr. Triolet Lelievre and awarded the Gold Medal in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900.

There is no other property of such unique outstanding universal values inscribed in UNESCO World Heritage List.