Pills used to be something else: Pharmaceutical history in the alchemy lab of TU Braunschweig
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Medical history as a sensory art experience: Pills used to be something else
How did active substances enter the human body in the past? The tour INDUSTRIAL CULTURE on site | Pills used to be something else invites you to the alchemy lab of TU Braunschweig on November 10, 2026, and opens up the surprisingly diverse history of solid pharmaceutical forms.
Pillars, wheels, tents: forms of a past medical world
The focus is on the historical path from early pharmaceutical forms to today's universal pill swallowing. The tour by Prof. Dr. Wahrig makes visible how households, pharmacies, and castle kitchens developed their own solutions for processing and administering active substances.
Historical materials, forms, and manufacturing processes are not only explained factually but can also be read as testimonies of a cultural history of medicine. The examination of the works focuses on those details where scientific progress, craftsmanship, and societal notions of health intersect.
Discover the Pharmaceutical Historical Collection Braunschweig
Another emphasis is on the history of the Pharmaceutical Historical Collection Braunschweig. In addition to established holdings, new products and acquisitions will also be presented. This creates a lively insight into the curation of a collection that connects medical knowledge, everyday history, and the history of science.
The exhibition atmosphere of the alchemy lab provides the perfect setting for this: Among historical objects, precise explanations, and the concentrated spatial impact, the aesthetic experience becomes cultural education. Old medical practices do not appear as a completed past but as a vivid part of modern knowledge history.
Tour with historical and scientific perspective
The event combines an expert tour with a narrative approach to the development of pharmaceuticals. Art historical terms such as materiality, formal language, and staging can be applied here to a collection, whose objects develop their own visual language through their traces of use and design.
The art experience of this special exhibition lies in the connection between object history and everyday culture. Those interested in museums, industrial culture, pharmaceutical history, or the development of scientific methods will gain new perspectives on seemingly familiar things.
Conclusion: Seeing medical knowledge anew
The tour promises a concentrated aesthetic experience between collection, science, and industrial culture. Visitors will experience how historical pharmaceutical forms, new acquisitions, and the history of drug manufacturing merge into a vivid narrative. The free event, requiring registration, is worthwhile for all who wish to experience medical cultural history directly and knowledgeably.
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