Pharmacists in transition. Academy and Pharmacy in Mexico from 1833 to 1865

Abstract

From the second half of the 19th century, health disciplines went through an institutional and professional restructuring, which progressively altered the guild order that had characterized them to that point. In the case of Pharmacy, this process implied the generation of officially recognized spaces, as the chairs of Pharmacy and Medical Substance, founded during the Establecimiento de Ciencias Médicas (Establishment of Medical Sciences) (1833). In those spaces it was sought to institutionalize knowledge and modern practices related to Pharmacy. In this work we look over the first academic experience of the pharmaceutical community in that new space of instruction, based on the records belonging to the students enrolled in the Establecimiento de Ciencias Médicas from 1833 to 1865, year of the enrollment of the last generation. The information contained in those 163 records displays the way the pharmaceutical field was transformed, after the aforementioned restructuring. The reader will notice the diverse normativity, which regulated the joining of pharmacists to academic life (of which, until then, they were excluded). He will also realize how, among the first students enrolled in the Establecimiento de Ciencias Médicas, said normativity was broke in order to adapt it to the known ways of students and professors. Progressively, the guild instruction would be ousted by the institutional instruction (for example, the years of practice in the drugstores were rejected), so that the guild ways of teaching were changing to turn the pharmacist into an individual of institutional instruction.