Chernoviz and the Alligator

The other day I was at a friend’s office, a company manager, when suddenly I came eye-to-eye with an alligator. How, you ask? Don’t believe me? Is it so out of the ordinary…? Okay okay, so I left out one small detail: it was a small metal alligator, cast in two parts, fastened to a shaft at the height of the jaw, and had a long sleek tail which served as a handle and leverage point…
I looked over at my friend like someone who had just unveiled some untold past, and asked him point-blank, “Tell me, were you a pharmacist?” He smiled—the friend, not the alligator—and confessed. Before entering the world of finance, he had been a pharmacist, an apothecary of a small waterfront town. Then he rattled off half a dozen short stories, really picturesque stories too; everything from delivering a baby without a doctor anywhere in sight to hundreds of tales he had left “filed” away in his memory for many long years, all due to his charitable and soft heart in the face of human pain…

Little did my friend know, but at that moment the metal alligator was stretching a bridge far out into my past, to Uncle Tim’s drugstore. Uncle Tim’s son, Atinho was a nostalgic companion of mine from the old school yard. There at the São Sebastião pharmacy, owned by Sebastião Acácio Teixeira—better known by the hypocoristic family name cited above—firmly fastened and bolted onto the wooden railing that lined the counter, my child eyes were admiring another alligator of the same dimensions, perhaps a second cousin to the unobtrusive saurian, or a melanosuchus niger, the black caiman reduced to biting off cork heads which the pharmacist wrestled into the bottlenecks of little dark tinted iodine bottles…

It was in the very same pharmacy where I saw that super fisherman for the first time, dragging the Scott’s Emulsion fish over his shoulder. Ugh! But who could forget that damned Scott’s Emulsionafter being shoved down our throats anyway?! It was also where they gave me all those anti-rabbis injections after Aunt Maninha’s tame and runt dogs bit me on my heels; where my parents bought all those capsules and elixirs against fever, sores and swells.
Nowadays, pharmacists are but common merchants. They close on Sundays, go to sleep early and no one gets them out of bed in the middle of the night to hear Colonel Marcolino’s snore or to attend to the laundromat widow’s son’s toothache… The last extension of a web whose egg hatches in the laboratories of profit-greedy multinationals, today’s pharmacists are to be the bureaucrats of disease.

Things were different in the old days. While doctors were rare and distant, always out of the poor’s financial reach, it was the pharmacist who attended at all hours, in any biboca or mountain side, when a herdsman moaned after being offended by a snake, or when the farmer woman groaned as her hour was approaching, or the little negro boy gasped in the throes of croup.

The boticário inherited his chemical fumes from Merlin himself. In the light of an oil lamp, Chernoviz in hand, he grinded in a homemade mortar his arsenal of salts, herbs and roots to stay off an unwanted fever or colic liable to tie one’s guts in a knot…

And lest someone doubt the old apothecary’s medicinal knowhow, my manager friend lent me a book from his shelf. Will I return it someday? His own 18^th edition Chernoviz. The Chernoviz was every pharmacist’s bible. In it, you can read about Baume’s aerometer, distilled waters, chemical compositions and general therapeutic practice.
On page 107, I read a recipe for strychnina granules:

– Strichnina                          0.5 centigrams.
– Powdered sugar.               2 gm
– Powdered Arabic gum     0.50 centigrams
– Honey syrup                      to taste
According to Chernoviz, this recipe should be administered in cases of amaurosis, paralysis, impotence, chorea, asthma and neuralgia.

In the last pages, they even show a list of the great-grandparents of commercial pharmaceutical products. For constipation: CASCARA ALEXANDRE, for varicose veins: HAMAMELINA ROYA, for gout, rheumatism and calculations: SAES OF LITHINA EFFERVESCENTES . And then, among the latest in medical science discoveries: Cacodylica Arsycodile medication, Dr. Niobey’s Papain, E. Fournier syrup, Aethone C7H16O3. And still—the wonder of wonders!—PHENOL-BOBOEUF, a single disinfectant, destroyer of ALL microbes , precious preservative against all contagious diseases including yellow fever, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, scarlet fever and tuberculosis, winner of the MONTHYON prize, awarded by the Paris Academy of Sciences…
And if you look carefully at some of these 2,342 pages, yellow with age, there you will find the paste, the miraculous ointment or sublimated able to cure all the ailments of this morbid start of a new century, along with cancer, stress and being unloved…