The Arc of Pharmacy

It was an inhalation that got me.

The allure of what we called aromatics,

Those vapors escaping from apothecary jars,

crude drugs, from rhizomes and roots,

bark, leaf, resin, an excrescence

ground to fine or crystalline power. 

The mstique of one whiff,

an intoxication stored in the olfactory vault.

 

Then it was the nomenclature, 

words from the old world

traveled across ocean and the clock.

Exotica on my tongue; in beaker and flask.

Anise and fennel, valerian and squill.

Benzoin, glycyrrhiza (licorice) and orange peel tincture.

Even the repulsion of asafetida and rancid acacia.

I felt the pull.

There was poetry in potassium permanganate,

gentian violet; how they stained my hands,

colored my imagining. Argyrol painted me

with arcana.

 

I was there when they bulldozed the garden,

The drugstore became deodorized,

the glossary rendered archaic. Merthiolate

gone. Rhubarb and soda vanished.

Flowers of sulfur withered away.

Stokes expectorant, Seidlitz powder replaced.

Aloe and senna, triturated into dust.

 

In came synthetics, assayed, the essence of the plant.

Not whole thyroid but the active fraction.

Not the leaf of Digitalis but the alkaloid, tittered.

Safe and effective was demanded. Proof !

Iodine tincture couldn’t,

Spirits of camphor, cocillana cough syrup couldn’t.

Disrepute was the fate of botanicals.

My imagined paradise paved over

in one exhalation, aroma and all.

The romance of pharmacy yielded to science,

to double-blind studies, to remissions and long life.