In a unique experiment, historian Ruth Goodman, Professor of Pharmacy Nick Barber and PhD student Tom Quick open the doors to an authentic Victorian Pharmacy. They recreate the birth and evolution of a retail institution we take for granted, but which was once a novel idea. They source ingredients, mix potions and dispense cures. But in an age when skin creams contained arsenic and cold medicines were based on opium, the team need to be highly selective. An age of social change is revealed. The Victorians brought healthcare within the reach of ordinary people for the very first time, and heralded a consumer revolution that reached far beyond medicine to create the model for the modern chemist as we know it today.