TWO years ago I had the pleasure of looking over the building which was at one time Higgins the chemist in Blue Boar Row.

This magnificent establishment has quite a history.

The site is one of the oldest virtually undeveloped buildings in the city. It is known to have been a coffee house from around 1730-50, and was a tavern until 1802 when it became an apothecary’s owned by Squarey and Sons.

Between 1850 and 1860 the business was bought by Read and Orchard before Clement William Higgins took it over, at a cost of £700, in 1912.

It is documented that Edwin Orchard, a well-known manufacturing chemist, would purchase Buckthorn berries from the gypsies by the ton and these were used in the preparation of the syrup, Succus Rhamni.

Many readers will be aware of the old coloured bottles used by chemists.

In this country the use of coloured bottles as a sign of the trade appears to have originated with the druggists in the late half of the seventeenth century. Hand-made medicine bottles were used exclusively until about 1936, when the cost became prohibitive.

In the 1980s, builders working in the centre of Salisbury on the Blue Boar Row chemist’s shop of Higgins and son unearthed a fascinating array of medicine bottles, some more than a century old.

At least 40 bottles were retrieved from under the floor and these included bottles which contained substances such as heroin and glycerol, and menthol and cocaine, used as a lozenge to treat catarrh.

As well as bottles of all shapes, colours and sizes, there was a suppository dispenser, a glass medicine measuring container, and a branch formulary containing secret prescriptions dating back to 1908.

The find offered an important insight into the early days of medicine and I believe are now housed in Salisbury museum.

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