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‘As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses… I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death – if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’

Professor Snape – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

We all know that Harry became a dab hand at Potions with a little help from the Half-Blood Prince; this was a fictional example of the handing down of knowledge over the centuries when it comes to mystical brews. Potions have been made for thousands of years – associated with bubbling pots and mysterious ingredients, they have been brewed to make medicines, drugs and poisons.

Alchemists dabbled a lot in potions, as well as making the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, which could reportedly transform base metal into gold and held the key to everlasting life. Potions can even be concocted to conjure different weather events. Their use in the community was well established, which has been proven by the medical books handed down through history, advocating their use.

Medieval apothecaries greatly contributed to the development of medical science; it is an art still practised to some extent in the pharmacies of today. Snape made Potions sound scary (he would, wouldn’t he?), but it’s also a fascinating subject.

PART 1: FROM APOTHECARIES TO CAULDRONS

Then they visited the Apothecary, which was fascinating enough to make up for its horrible smell, a mixture of bad eggs and rotted cabbages. Barrels of slimy stuff stood on the floor; jars of herbs, dried roots, and bright powders lined the walls; bundles of feathers, strings of fangs, and snarled claws hung from the ceiling.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

When Harry and Hagrid visited the apothecary in Diagon Alley, they were met with an assortment of ‘slimy stuff’, herb jars, roots, powders, feathers and claws. Historically, an apothecary served as a sort of chemist or pharmacist, and texts recording symptoms and prescriptions have been found originating in the ancient societies of China, Babylon and Egypt.

Apothecaries kept guides for supplying remedies. If you walked into an apothecary shop with a cough, migraine or headache, the owner would open their book of secrets. In a typical 14th-century manuscript, there would have been a lot of illustrations and recipes, which would point to lots of ingredients from the natural world. People from the Middle Ages had a much closer working relationship with these natural ingredients than we do today.

One such manuscript once belonged to King Henry VIII of England, an avid book collector, and was eventually acquired by the physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane, the man after whom Sloane Square in London is named. Because it would have cost so much to make the book originally, it would have been rarely opened but kept instead as a valuable possession, probably belonging to a monastery and other wealthy individuals before ending up in the royal collection.

The manuscript was beautifully made, coloured with a combination of reds, golds and a dark yet vibrant blue pigment – one of the illustrations within it depicted the apothecary consulting with a client. The client sits while the apothecary stands, conveying the higher status of the customer. But apothecaries themselves were high status – at the top of the tree in society alongside lawyers and property owners. They were wealthy, too.

It turned out that Hagrid knew quite as much about unicorns as he did about monsters, though it was clear that he found their lack of poisonous fangs disappointing.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

One magical being strongly associated with apothecaries from the Middle Ages was the unicorn. It was not unusual to see spectacular signs hanging outside apothecary shops in the shape of a unicorn’s head.

One such sign, dating from the 18th century, now resides at the Science Museum in London. Probably from England or the Netherlands, the unicorn’s head is carved from oak. It appears happy, healthy and alert, with a hint of a smile and a bit of a goatee.

Extravagant shop signs were common in cities like London. They acted like logos and were an early form of branding, as well as being a useful way of navigating the streets when much of the population was illiterate. The result was streets festooned with an array of gaudy and memorable signs made from heavy wood and wrought iron, in the shape of giant frying pans, keys and coffins.

The health-and-safety conscious might spot a potential problem here, and on one particularly stormy night in London in 1718, this problem was brought home to the population. The powerful gusts of wind that whistled down the city’s streets caused a huge shop sign in Bride Street in the Spitalfields area of the city to collapse – four people were killed.

This was one incident of many, but it seems that 18th-century London was slow to realise the potential dangers, because it wasn’t until 1762 that a government commission was undertaken to see what they could do about it. It was decreed that signs had to be laid or mounted flat against buildings, which is why most shops and restaurants have signs like that now. Pubs proved to be an exception to the rule – luckily for the Leaky Cauldron!

Of course, the unicorn that was used to signpost the apothecary’s shop wasn’t real – but its horn was. Except for the fact that it was actually the tusk of a narwhal.

Narwhals are whales and are known as ‘the unicorns of the sea’ on account of the spiral pattern on their tusk and their rather elegant physical appearance (somewhere between a dolphin and a whale).

These ‘unicorn horns’ were rumoured to have unique medicinal powers – from curing leprosy to being a potent aphrodisiac. But most intriguingly, they were considered to be a universal antidote to poison. Right up until the 1780s, the French royal family had unicorn horn (in the form of a narwhal tusk) dipped into their drinks to proof the drink against poison.

Accordingly, the tusks were worth huge amounts of money and carried a lot of status. Queen Elizabeth I had two, one of which was part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. From today’s perspective, the idea of having a unicorn-horn cure might seem naïve, but even now most people don’t know how their medicines work, or how they are chemically composed. In that sense, to the majority of people, taking unicorn horn would not have been that different to taking most medicines today – you take it, hope for the best and don’t think twice about it when you get better.