Pharmacy and the making of a museum
Thompson was born in Liverpool and studied chemistry and pharmacy as a young man. He wrote practical pharmaceutical handbooks as well as works for a wider audience. His association with Henry Wellcome began in the late 1890s, when he helped acquire and organise material for an ambitious historical collection.
In 1913 he became the first conservator of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. The surviving archive includes recipe books, essays, correspondence and research on subjects ranging from ancient Egyptian medicine to ergot. These papers show a working historian gathering evidence from objects and documents. His professional life joined practical pharmaceutical knowledge with an interest in the beliefs and procedures of earlier medicine.
The history behind alchemy and remedies
The Mystery and Romance of Alchemy and Pharmacy appeared in 1897, before the public opening of the museum. Its preface looks back at earlier investigators from an age of rapid scientific change. Thompson’s subjects include alchemy, the lore surrounding plants, and the stories through which medical and chemical knowledge acquired authority.
His discussion of Goethe places literary imagination alongside the history of experimental practice. Across the volume, recipes and reported marvels become evidence of what people believed and attempted. The interest lies partly in the distance between a procedure’s original purpose and the later historian’s explanation. The book records Thompson’s reconstruction of that past, including the categories and assumptions he brought to it.
