Albert Ciurana Pharmacy Museum

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

Old-fashioned shops

Art objects, paintings, herbariums, machines, porcelain; antique earthenware, tortoise shells, boa or crocodile skins, snakes and buffalo horns, ovens, alembics, crucibles and retorts... The museum recreates the special atmosphere of 19th and 20th century dispensaries, and offers a journey into the daily life of Montpellier's master apothecaries.

Inseparable from medical thought, medicines are at the heart of this collection, with raw materials from botany, physical chemistry, mycology, toxicology and poisons... but also from human beings. The museum retraces the lives and work of scientists who have left their mark on the history of science, and made the reputation of Montpellier pharmacy.

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