Droguier

Ranked second in France after Paris, Montpellier's Droguier museum bears witness to a long medical and pharmaceutical tradition. Established at the end of the 16th century following the creation of the Jardin des Plantes, it houses a rare collection of over 10,000 samples, mainly plants. Regularly expanded, this living museum is a valuable resource for understanding the history of "drugs" (plants, minerals, and animal substances with medicinal or nutritional properties) and the discovery of new medicines. Now housed within the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Montpellier Herbarium has been listed as a Historic Monument since November 20, 2009.

Droguier The Montpellier Droguier contains nearly 10,000 drug samples. Built up over centuries of travel and trade with the rest of the world, these collections remain very much alive and continue to grow thanks to donations and bequests. But also thanks to research: today, the Droguier is a very active center for education and research.

A place of teaching, research, and cultural discovery, the apothecary is a mecca for ethnopharmacology: the science that studies traditional knowledge related to the use of plants and what they can teach us. This knowledge is rather complex, as plants are a veritable cocktail of chemical compounds that vary according to many parameters, including the season, the soil in which they grow, and the amount of sunlight they receive.

A long history

In the mid-16th century, Guillaume de Rondelet, regent of the university of medicine, created Montpellier's first botanical garden. In 1588, a drugstore was established on the initiative of a Montpellier apothecary, Bernardin II Duranc, who decided to set up a sample collection in his "shop" on Rue de l'Aiguillerie in order to teach medical students about the virtues of plants. The doors of the university opened to a master apothecary... Heir to this first herb garden, the Droguier de Montpellier was moved in 1963 to the new premises of the Faculty of Pharmacy.