Blue is for Poison. Tonella's Pharmacy, Zuiderpark 18, Groningen, The Netherlands
The year 1896 must've been a busy time for Johannes Antonius Jakobus Tonella (1868-1950). He was a scion of an originally Swiss family from the town of Cavergno in the Ticino that had settled in Groningen in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tonella followed in the footsteps of his father and studied pharmacy intent on becoming a pharmacist if not a toxicologist. Indeed, he went on and was awarded his doctorate at the Groningen University in 1896 for his important dissertation on physiological aspects of alpha-normal-propyl tetrahydrochinoline and coniine. The first is an antibacterial agent, the latter a potent poison, famous especially as the active agent in the poison hemlock which killed Socrates; interestingly it turns the mouth - used so much rhetorically by that great Philosopher - blue.
Anyway... back to Tonella's Pharmacy. In that same 1896, Tonella, apparently not penniless, built himself a villa-pharmacy just on the edge of Stad at Zuiderpark 18. When I lived in Groningen, those tile-tableaux in the photo weren't visible until perhaps the middle of the first decade of the 21st century when the building was restored. They were covered by white and yellowish paint. The other day, on a visit to Groningen, I noticed how fascinating they are; hence that composite photo.
Those tableaux (the photo shows three of four) clearly picture all the attributes of pharmacy. Contemplating them, I more or less assumed that Tonella had instructed his architect, well-known Kornelis Hoekzema (1844-1911), and the pictorial artist Franciscus Hermannus Bach (1865-1956), to pictify general pharmaceutical themes and the common names of historical persons important in the field. So I quite expected to see Lavoisier, Dioscorides, Galenus, Aesculapius, Hippokrates and Paracelsus; they're ordinary tropes in this context. But I was happily surprised to see that Tonella really knew what he was doing, and put his own mark on that 'common knowledge'. He had his artist add Orfila.
Orfila?! Who he, you might well ask. Well, Mathieu Joseph Bonaventura Orfila i Rotger (1787-1853) - or Mateu Josep Bonaventura in Catalan - was an eminent Minorcan-French toxicologist who worked in Paris from 1830 onwards. And that fits in precisely with Tonella's own interest in poisons as evidenced by his dissertation.
That the top tableau has a blue background... well, I don't think there's a connection there to Socrates. It would be nice to think so...
And I haven't even remarked on the botanical imagery!
Blue is for Poison. Tonella's Pharmacy, Zuiderpark 18, Groningen, The Netherlands
The year 1896 must've been a busy time for Johannes Antonius Jakobus Tonella (1868-1950). He was a scion of an originally Swiss family from the town of Cavergno in the Ticino that had settled in Groningen in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tonella followed in the footsteps of his father and studied pharmacy intent on becoming a pharmacist if not a toxicologist. Indeed, he went on and was awarded his doctorate at the Groningen University in 1896 for his important dissertation on physiological aspects of alpha-normal-propyl tetrahydrochinoline and coniine. The first is an antibacterial agent, the latter a potent poison, famous especially as the active agent in the poison hemlock which killed Socrates; interestingly it turns the mouth - used so much rhetorically by that great Philosopher - blue.
Anyway... back to Tonella's Pharmacy. In that same 1896, Tonella, apparently not penniless, built himself a villa-pharmacy just on the edge of Stad at Zuiderpark 18. When I lived in Groningen, those tile-tableaux in the photo weren't visible until perhaps the middle of the first decade of the 21st century when the building was restored. They were covered by white and yellowish paint. The other day, on a visit to Groningen, I noticed how fascinating they are; hence that composite photo.
Those tableaux (the photo shows three of four) clearly picture all the attributes of pharmacy. Contemplating them, I more or less assumed that Tonella had instructed his architect, well-known Kornelis Hoekzema (1844-1911), and the pictorial artist Franciscus Hermannus Bach (1865-1956), to pictify general pharmaceutical themes and the common names of historical persons important in the field. So I quite expected to see Lavoisier, Dioscorides, Galenus, Aesculapius, Hippokrates and Paracelsus; they're ordinary tropes in this context. But I was happily surprised to see that Tonella really knew what he was doing, and put his own mark on that 'common knowledge'. He had his artist add Orfila.
Orfila?! Who he, you might well ask. Well, Mathieu Joseph Bonaventura Orfila i Rotger (1787-1853) - or Mateu Josep Bonaventura in Catalan - was an eminent Minorcan-French toxicologist who worked in Paris from 1830 onwards. And that fits in precisely with Tonella's own interest in poisons as evidenced by his dissertation.
That the top tableau has a blue background... well, I don't think there's a connection there to Socrates. It would be nice to think so...
And I haven't even remarked on the botanical imagery!