This Is The Concòrdies, Europe's Second Oldest Pharmacopoeia And The First Of Its Kind. It Was Printed

This is the Concòrdies, Europe's second oldest pharmacopoeia and the first of its kind. It was printed in 1511 in Barcelona, Catalonia. The first European pharmacopoeia was printed in Florence (modern-day Italy) in 1498 after a larger amount in Islamic countries, but both have some important differences.

A pharmacopoeia is a book that contains the recipes for making medicines, to be used as a reference guide by the apothecaries who made the remedies. The apothecaries were the chemists who made the drugs, specialists in medicinal herbs, minerals, animal products and food.

On August 29th 1510, the king Ferdinand of Catalonia-Aragon gave Barcelona's Apothecaries Association the royal privilege of standardizing the recipes used for making drugs. Before this, doctors diagnosed their patients and told them what drugs to buy, but each apothecary made it in their way, which could have different amounts of each ingredient or different preparations. This could lead to results that weren't as good as expected.

You might have noticed that the book is titled "Concordie apothecarioru[m] Barchin[one] i[n] medicinis co[m]positis liber feliciter incipit" (more or less "Agreement of Barcelona's apothecaries on the compound medicines" in Latin), often shortened to "les Concòrdies" ("the Agreements" in Catalan). It's an "agreement" because the apothecaries came together to write the most effective recipes, which they then presented to the Barcelona Medicine Doctors' Association. Then, the doctors could object or not, and from the agreement between both experts resulted this book.

This is the first pharmacopoeia that was made by the apothecaries' idea, not following orders of a government, and the first pharmacopoeia written for and by the apothecaries (the book written in Florence was made by doctors to tell apothecaries what they wanted them to make). Thanks to their apothecaries' work, Barcelona's inhabitants were the first people in the Iberian peninsula to access homologated medicine. Soon, this book's rules were expanded to all of Catalonia.

The only remaining original copy from the 1511 edition is kept in the Museum of Catalan Pharmacology which belongs to the University of Barcelona. The whole book has been digitalized and is completely uploaded online: here's the link.