Guide
The pharmacy history museum at İstanbul University's faculty of pharmacy exists because one man gave up waiting. The first attempt to preserve the trade's material dates to the 1930s, when Naşit Baylav, who wrote the first book on the history of pharmacy in Turkey, appealed to colleagues to build a collection; the Second World War ended the effort. Prof. Dr. Turhan Baytop argued in print for years that the profession should look after its own past, and when appeals produced nothing he founded a museum in the faculty out of his personal collection.
It grew by gift. Friends and colleagues of Baytop added to it, and Prof. Dr. Afife Mat, who worked as his assistant and later chaired the pharmacognosy department, describes the most important single contribution as the transfer in 1962 of material from the chief physician's room at Topkapı by the palace museum's director Hayrullah Örs. The collection was moved between rooms as the damp and the lack of space allowed, and when the faculty buildings were emptied for strengthening after the 1999 earthquake Mat took the objects into the archive building for safekeeping. Restoration finished in 2010, two halls beside the dean's office were set aside, and after the necessary procedure was completed with the university's museums and cultural heritage centre the collection, formed in 1960, was approved on 29 October 2017 and formally opened as a museum on 27 February 2018.
What is displayed covers the history of pharmacy education in Turkey, of the dispensing chemist and of the drug industry — the cabinet for violent poisons and the cabinet for drugs to be kept separately from the Enderun dispensary at Topkapı, porcelain drug jars, glass bottles and boxes for crude drugs. Much remains unshown and unstudied, including Ottoman prescription registers given to the museum, which Mat says need research of their own.
