This museum in Budapest is dedicated to pharmaceutical oddities—including a cure-all that will turn your stomach

Located inside Buda Castle, the historic palace complex of Hungarian royalty, the Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum is tiny but mighty. For visitors interested in medicine and alchemy, this museum offers insight into what healthcare in the Middle Ages might have looked like. The museum began as a merchant’s house in the 15th century, until an alchemist moved into the building in the mid 1700s, establishing the first professional pharmacy in what is now Budapest. That alchemist named his business Golden Eagle and the building survived the 16th century Turkish siege, 17th century Austrian conquest and Nazi and Soviet occupation during World War II. In 1973, the building was re-opened as a museum and became a place to display historical medicines and tools. The collection of unusual items include bowls, herbs, dried animals, medications dating to the Renaissance and Baroque eras and books on the history of medicine. There is also a recreation of a chemist’s lab.But among all the strange items is a box of mummia or mummy powder. Easy to spot (it has a decaying head on top!) the powder is made up of ground-up mummies meant to be applied as a salve or eaten.This particular medicinal product was the result of a mistranslation. In ancient times, Arab people used Bitumen, a tar-like substance, in their medicine. They called this ingredient mummia. After invading Egypt, they also began to call cloth-wrapped corpses left behind by Ancient Egyptians mummia as well—wrongly believing that these bodies were prepared for the afterlife with bitumen, which was how the Greeks and Romans embalmed their dead. (Ancient Egyptians actually prepared their mummies with a natural salt.) During the crusades, due to a failed translation, mummia and bitumen began to be conflated. By the 1400s, mummia was used to treat all sorts of ailments: it was used as a blood thinner, as a painkiller, a cough suppressant, an anti-inflammatory, a menstrual aid and even to promote wound healing. Aside from being medically unsound, this also meant that mummies were unearthed and destroyed in the process. Some merchants began to make new mummies to keep up with the demand, buying the recently dead and stuffing them with herbs and leaving them out to dry. By the 1600s, mummies were the treatment du jour: people from Francis Bacon to the French King Francis I used mummia and Shakespeare even wrote about it in Othello and Macbeth. While the use of mummia as a medication began to die out by the 18th century, Egyptian mummies continued to be a major part of European commerce for another 100 years, until the Egyptian government began to crack down on the mummy trade. Despite that, mummia was advertised as medication as late as the 20th century—a pharmaceutical catalog from as late as 1908 described a “Genuine Egyptian mummy” for sale. For history buffs who want to learn a bit more about this odd medication, and see a piece of medical history in person, the Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum is a must-visit.

This museum in Budapest is dedicated to pharmaceutical oddities—including a cure-all that will turn your stomach

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