A Little Bit of History

Several years ago we were given the opportunity to take some old stuff from Albert Priest’s London Pharmacy. Let me hasten to add, these items weren’t going to be used, they were taken for historical interest only.

Albert Priest set up a practice on London in 1948 – the same year that the NHS was started and where patients would then get medical treatment free, whereas up till then they had had to pay for both consultations and medicines. It wasn’t the best time to start in private practice on the face of it, but Priest succeeded in building up a large successful practice in the large old house where he, his wife and two daughters lived upstairs. Albert and his wife Lilian write Herbal Medication – a Clinical and Dispensary Handbook

One of his daughters contacted us because we wanted to buy Priest’s big tincture press. We went through the waiting room, clinic room, dispensary and the Pharmacy in the basement where the items pictured here were stored, and his daughter let us take a random selection of items that had laid unused for at least 30 years.

Some of the bottles and tins still contained herbs. It was as if Albert had just walked out of his dispensary and forgotten to come back…