Advertisement for Carpenter's chemical wharehouse, 301 Market Street, Philadelphia.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Philadelphia Museum of Art, owner.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Patent medicines.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia] : [publisher not identified], 1834.

Notes:

Collection reference: 1989-69-26

Frontispiece from George Washington Carpenter, 'Essays on Some of the Most Important Articles of the Materia Medica', 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: G. W. Carpenter, 1834).

Please note that some of the metadata for this document has been drawn from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's catalogue.

The advertisement showing the façade of Carpenter's Chemical Warehouse at Eighth and Market streets in Philadelphia appeared as the frontispiece to the second edition of a collection of essays by George Washington Carpenter, a druggist who also sold chemical and scientific apparatus. Not only are the names of many popular products listed on this print, but, rather surprisingly in an age of secret remedies, the contents of some of them are also revealed. The head of Aesculapius over the bow window represents a continuation of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British custom of using the busts of such famous figures from the history of medicine on apothecary shops, a useful device when homes and stores were not yet given street numbers and illiteracy was widespread. William H. Helfand, from 'The Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy from the William H. Helfand Collection' (1991), p. 123.

Title from publisher's website.

Description based on publisher metadata (last viewed April 22, 2025).