MUSEUMS OF ROMANIA: The History of Pharmacy Museum in Cluj Napoca

The History of Pharmacy Museum, Romania's first such institution, sits in the city of Cluj-Napoca, at No. 28 Union Square, and holds over 3,000 exhibits dating from the fourteenth century. The Transylvanian city of Sibiu has a similar museum.

Founded in 1954 at the initiative of Professor Valeriu Bologa of the Cluj University of Medicine and Pharmacy, the museum is tucked in the Hintz House, a historic monument dating from the fifteenth century, which accommodated the town's first pharmacy "St. George" — founded by a Saxon family — throughout its uninterrupted operation for almost 400 years (1573 — 1949). As of 1752, the space was rented out to private pharmacists and the first tenant was privileged pharmacist Tobias Mauksch; in 1863, it became ownership of the Hintz family. The property was returned in 2008 to a descendant of the Hintz family (who were the last pharmacists to work here until 1949).

The Hintz House — 1904
Photo credit: aronet.ro

The initial core for the establishment of the museum was the collection of Transylvanian pharmaceutical items of Professor and Corresponding Academy Member Iuliu Orient (1869-1940), which was displayed at the Transylvanian Museum in 1904. Other donations added later on, all bearing remarkable testimony to the pharmaceutical activity in 16th — 19th century Transylvania.

The collection is displayed in three rooms of the old pharmacy and two laboratories that preserve the medieval setting, located at the basement, where an entire arsenal of tools used for the preparation of drugs meets the visitor's eyes: there's a distiller for obtaining the alcohol used to extract tinctures from various herbs, containers for melting substances, bowls for the hot preparation of...