Circulating and consuming drugs in late 17th-century Venice between theory and practice

Even in the field of pharmacopoeia, there are documents that explain how things were supposed to be - the theorized norm - and documents that, more often accidentally than intentionally, shed light on how things really were. If the official pharmacopoeia and price-list outline the models according to which medicines were produced and sold, pharmaceutical practice tells us something quite different. It reveals the presence of: flourishing shops that did not even possess a copy of the official pharmacopoeia, but relied on private and foreign ones, which often displayed an openness towards chemical remedies unknown in Italian ones; apothecaries-inventors of remedies patended for the originality of their recipes by comparison with those included in the official pharmacopoeia; medicines that circulated in the most varied ways: not only on doctors' prescriptions but also on the advice of nurses and laypeople; drugs that could be sold at a reduced price, donated or exchanged; medicines that were consumed by an audience amplified by relationsips of kinship, friendship or neighbourhood and by forms of professional collaboration unrelated to medicine. In addition to drawing on previous research and on a number of apothecary inventories, the article focuses on two lesser-known sources that offer an unexpected picture of the actual circulation and consumption of medicines in Venice in the late 17th and early 18th century. These are: a survey conducted by the Giudici dell'Esaminador in 1672, in which figures from various walks of life are asked to recount under what circumstances and how they made use of the products of some religious apothecary shops; a series of documents relating to the management of the Dominican apothecary shop in the convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo that also offer a new and varied picture of drug sales/exchanges/gifts and of unexpected agents active in the circulation of medicines (nurses, sons of conversi, relatives and friends of religious men, apothecary assistants, etc.).