New Orleans, Louisiana: New Orleans Pharmacy Museum: Leeches

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum is easily the coolest museum in NOLA!

On our walking tour, the guide told us of a grisly side to the pharmacy. There is a trap door in the ceiling above the carriage space. On the upper floor of the pharmacy the pharmacist infected people with yellow fever, then promised to pay them when they helped him find the cure, which didn't happen. When the patients died, he used the ceiling trap door to drop the bodies into his wagon, drove it to the swamp, and fed the bodies to the alligators -- which is why he was never caught. The pharmacist confessed his illegal experiments years later, on his death bed.

We walked in on the second half of the tour when we arrived at the museum. The "tour" was more of a lecture/show-and-tell on the main floor. It is a must: the guide is charming, funny, and he delivered a remarkable amount of information in a short span of time. Really fascinating!

This is a fun little two floor museum. I couldn't take any pictures of the exhibits because a sign outside indicates phones aren't allowed. There are lots of antique bottles and preparation devices There is a section on questionable practices such as blood letting and a display of instruments. The Voodoo section is particularly interesting. The cures were carried around in pockets in clothing and not ingested.

The second floor has sections on gasses, dental care and homeopathy.

You can learn a lot about medicine (old and new) in this museum. The leeches are gross but cool. Maybe I'm biased being the son of a pharmacist, but I found this more interesting than the dumb shops in the F.Q. They all have the same trinkets and beads.