James Frencham

James Frencham was a British pharmacist who opened what was probably the first court pharmacy in Russia in Moscow in 1581 .

In the meantime he returned to England (1584), but came again and finally to Moscow in November 1602 at the request of Tsar Boris Godunov and with a letter of recommendation from Queen Elizabeth I. He brought his wife, two sons and three daughters with him. On the way to Russia he traveled through Germany and the Baltic States and reported the devastation caused by the plague .

In 1581 and 1602 he brought a number of medicines to Russia, the list of which has been preserved. Among the medicines, many were made from plant substances, often preserved with sugar, including opium, camphor, senna leaves, cinnamon, sulfur blossom, resin (diacrydium), calamus, aloe from China, cantharidin, white sea onion (squilla), manna, rhubarb from Persia . On the other hand, there were hardly any animal medicines, as some of them were banned in Russia (e.g. Theriac , as this was mixed with snake meat, musk , beaver horn ). The pharmacy was in the Kremlin and was splendidly furnished. It was only available to the Tsar's family and, with the Tsar's permission, individual boyars. Ordinary Muscovites went to herb shops.

His pharmacy remained the only real pharmacy in Moscow for a long time, and in 1672 a second outside the Kremlin was added on the orders of the Tsar.

The question of whether he was the first pharmacist in the service of the tsar is controversial, as the Dutchman Arent Claessen van Stellingwerf is another candidate who may have been in the tsar's service as early as 1576. It is possible that there was a Russian court pharmacy (which Russian medical historians in particular advocated), but it was less well stocked.

literature

• Wilhelm Michael von Richter: History of Medicin in Russia, Volume 1, Moscow 1813, p. 396ff
• Sabine Dumschat: Foreign Doctors in Moscow Russia, Franz Steiner 2006, p. 86
• Heinz Müller-Dietz: Doctors in Russia in the 18th Century, Bechtle 1973
• Winfried Pötsch u. a. Lexicon of important chemists , Harri Deutsch 1989

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Winfried R. Pötsch, Annelore Fischer and Wolfgang Müller with the assistance of Heinz Cassebaum: Lexicon of important chemists , VEB Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig, 1988, p. 155, ISBN 3-323-00185-0 .