Pharmacy Museum, New Orleans

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum is a curious little treasure — part history lesson, part ghost story, and part garden escape. It manages to be educational, eerie, and oddly charming all at once.

You can explore it on your own or follow a guided tour, but either way, you are stepping into what is considered the nation’s first licensed pharmacy, once run by Louis J. Dufilho Jr., recognized as the first licensed pharmacist in the United States. Naturally, because this is New Orleans, the building also comes with a side order of supposed hauntings. History here does not just whisper — it occasionally rattles the cabinets...

The museum covers two floors, and the first creaky wooden level recreates a working 19th-century apothecary, complete with an 1855 soda fountain. Rosewood cabinets hold bloodletting tools, microscopes, old cosmetics, and enough mysterious bottles to make modern medicine look refreshingly boring. At the prescription counter, visitors can see how pharmacists once mixed, measured, and filled vintage containers with everything from herbs and voodoo potions to opium and cocaine-based remedies. In other words, back in the day, a simple trip to the pharmacy came with considerably more drama...

Upstairs, the tone shifts from curious to slightly alarming. The examination room includes a hospital bed, surgical instruments, old wheelchairs, crutches, inhalers, spectacles, and child-birthing devices that may make you silently thank every medical advance of the last century. It is fascinating, but also a useful reminder that “vintage” is lovely for furniture and less comforting for surgery...

Behind the building, the courtyard offers a calmer ending. Away from the busy street, herbs and flowers recall the natural ingredients once used in pharmacy work. Aloe soothed burns, jasmine eased upset stomachs, foxglove stimulated the heart, and Angel’s Trumpet helped with asthma symptoms — though, as with many old remedies, admiration is safer than experimentation.

A visit to the Pharmacy Museum is both money and time well spent. Come for the history, stay for the oddities, enjoy the courtyard, and leave with a renewed appreciation for modern prescriptions that do not involve bloodletting, cocaine, or a haunted staircase.