Albert Ciurana Pharmacy Museum

Housed in the Faculty of Pharmacy, the Albert Ciurana Museum offers an insight into the history of this discipline, which has been taught in Montpellier since the 13th century. Telling the story of pharmacy in all its forms (industrial, biological, hospital, and officinal): this is the idea behind this museum, founded in 1972 by Albert Ciurana, a dispensing pharmacist. The only pharmacy museum of this importance to be located on a university campus, it is constantly enriched by donations and run by volunteers who are qualified pharmacists.

Old pharmacies

Art objects, paintings, herbariums, machines, porcelain, antique earthenware, turtle shells, boa or crocodile skins, snakes and buffalo horns, as well as ovens, stills, crucibles, and retorts... The museum recreates the unique atmosphere of 19th- and 20th-century apothecaries, offering visitors a glimpse into the daily lives of Montpellier's master apothecaries.

Inseparable from medical thinking, medicine is at the heart of this collection, with raw materials sourced from botany, physical chemistry, mycology, toxicology, and poisons... but also from humans. The museum traces the lives and work of scientists who have marked the history of science and built the reputation of Montpellier's pharmacy.

Among them was Antoine-Jérôme Balard, a chemist and pharmacist who discovered bromine and was the teacher of L. Pasteur and M. Berthelot. Or Jules-Émile Planchon, a brilliant botanist, pharmacist, and doctor, dean of the School of Pharmacy and director of the Jardin des Plantes, who saved the Languedoc vineyards from extinction during the phylloxera crisis at the end of the 19th century.