The Victorian Pharmacy (DVD)

From the makers of Victorian Farm. In this new BBC television series, historian Ruth Goodman, Professor of Pharmacy Nick Barber and PhD student Tom Quick are opening the doors to an authentic 19th century pharmacy located in Blists Hill Victorian Town in Shropshire. They are recreating the birth and evolution of a high street institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea. They bring 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 need to be highly selective. They only try out safe versions of traditional remedies on carefully selected customers. They discover an age of social change that brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time and heralded a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern high street chemist as we know it today.

Biographies of Ruth Goodman, Nick Barber and Tom Quick