HISTORY OF THE PEER PHARMACY

On 14 May 1787, the pharmacist Johann Peter Paul Peer (1758 - 1836) bought the house and fixtures of the municipal pharmacy that had been first established in Brixen in 1602. Thus begins the history of a family that has remained closely connected with the town up to the present time in an unbroken succession of generations that maintain the tradition of a pharmacy of which there are still only a few in the German-speaking area. We owe a wealth of excellently well-preserved objects, a very important source of history, to this unusual continuity and the happy circumstance that, in spite of the numerous reconstructions and modernisations of the pharmacy, the no longer used stock was not destroyed but kept.

These are now exhibited in the pharmacy museum in the same building, a treasure trove for pharmacy-historical research. There you can find next to earlier furniture, traditional drugs and chemical supplies, jars, packets, labels, measuring and weighing instruments as well as historical laboratory equipment, scientific investigative instruments and an extensive library.

The location of the town of Brixen on the most important trading routes of old Europe was extremely beneficial for the international status of the pharmacy. If you look at the „instruments“ of generations of pharmacists, then you will see that they are always of the best quality available at that time. This holds true for the various pieces of equipment for producing medicine as also for the equipment for chemical and physical drug study.

The change from the empirical-technical pharmacist skills to scientific pharmacy can be clearly seen from the highly specialised laboratory equipment that found its way, since the end of the 18th century, into the pharmacy. In addition to the pharmacopoeia of Nuremberg and Augsburg, to those from London, Paris and Vienna as well as the various editions of the Austrian, Bavarian and Prussian dispensaries, there is a wealth of scientific reference books and magazines.

Using the example of the municipal pharmacy of Brixen four hundred years of pharmacy history can be reproduced in fact not only from historical documents, but especially from physical objects.