Matera was the protagonist in Pesaro, city of culture 2024, at the 73rd National Congress of the History of Pharmacy which revolved around the theme of manuscript sources. The event, which took place at the historic Villa Caprile, is organized by the Italian Academy of Pharmacy History. During the congress, experts and enthusiasts of the subject shared their knowledge, participated in information sessions and discussed developments in the field of historical pharmacy. Speaker of excellence for Basilicata was the pharmacist from Matera Nunzio Longo, author of numerous publications on the history of local pharmacy, who presented an interesting study on the “Speciaria sixteenth-century Matera”.
Longo’s study starts from the discovery of some sixteenth-century documents kept in the State Archives of the city of Sassi and which allowed him to reconstruct the primordial history of the presence of the first pharmacy, called spiceria, in the city, placing it at number 1 of Salita Cathedral. Connected to this ‘speciaria’ is the physicist Eustachio Verricelli who in his “Cronica de la città di Matera 1595-1596” describes the therapies and plants of the time.
It is Verricelli himself who witnesses the existence of an excellent ‘Matera natural pharmacopoeia’ in which the flora has donated medicinal and healing herbs and plants from which decoctions, infusions and mixtures useful for healing the illnesses of adults and children have been produced. In his report Longo highlighted some fundamental aspects of pharmaceutical and pharmacological research of the time: even then, pharmaceutical treatment methods drew inspiration and lessons from luminaries such as Galen, Mattioli and Dioscorides. In the 16th century, there was already a firm belief that pharmacological treatment should be based on the ‘theory of opposites’ which has been handed down to this day, so much so that by taking antibiotics we cure infectious diseases by contrasting the active ingredient with the cause of the disease itself.
Documentary historicity also led Longo to come across the arguments of the Melfi doctor and philosopher Vincenzo Bruno who still cites Galen as the original inspirer of various healing methodologies based on ‘Hippocratic medicine’ based on trust in the organism’s intrinsic healing capacity. Thus the ‘theory of humours’ was developed on the basis of which it was believed that the human body was permeated by four decisive humours: blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile, all capable of maintaining balance (eucrasia) bringing health to the body. body. If there had been only one imbalance (dyscrasia), the body would have had a decay that would have resulted in disease.
In his report Longo cites the manuscript ‘Platea di Santa Lucia’ which tells of the relationship between the Benedictine nuns of Santa Lucia and the apothecary Don Angelo Giordano, to whom they rented the first local pharmacy with a rent of five ducats. The Platea is nothing more than an ecclesiastical document containing an inventory of the possessions of monasteries, churches or dioceses.
For Nunzio Longo “it is a source of pride to have presented the ‘speciaria materana’ at the National Congress of the History of Pharmacy because Matera has demonstrated that it has an immense historical value in the pharmaceutical sector which dates back to 1598. Even then the ‘speciaria’ had a role fundamental and prestigious among the high-ranking people and this is demonstrated by the fact that the location was not in the Sassi districts inhabited by the poorest people, but close by and therefore in an area where the rich of the time resided”.
The Regional President of Federfarma Basilicata Antonio Guerricchio compliments Nunzio Longo “for this discovery and for having brought the results to a national congress”, underlining “the importance of this further historical discovery which makes us understand that we are part – as pharmacies – of a territorial assistance system that starts from very far away and which, constantly evolving, has reached the present day maintaining its original mission of helping people feel better”. Speciaria San Lucia in via Duomo in Matera
Nunzio Longo
