History
The pharmacy was founded in 1874, at the height of the "Roman Question", when Cardinal Secretary of State Giacomo Antonelli asked Eusebio Ludvig Fronmen, a Fatebenefratelli monk, who ran a nearby pharmacy, to take charge of supplying medicines for the pope and cardinals residing in the Vatican. Popes had been confined to the Vatican since an 1870 dispute with the Italian government, when Rome was annexed into the Kingdom of Italy.
The pharmacy remained only a storeroom until 1892, when a permanent office was established to offer health care services to the pope, cardinals, and bishops of the Vatican. In 1917, the pharmacy was moved to St. Anne's Gate, closer to the main entrance of the Vatican. At the time, the Vatican pharmacy was immensely popular for offering medicines which were otherwise unobtainable within Rome. Even today, due to the complicated bureaucratic drug approval process of the Italian government, the pharmacy often has medicines months to years before Italian pharmacies.
After the Lateran treaties of 1929, the pharmacy was moved to its current location in Palazzo Belvedere, behind the Vatican central post office and across from the Vatican supermarket. Unlike Italian pharmacies, the Vatican Pharmacy will fill foreign prescriptions.
Read more about this topic: Vatican Pharmacy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)