The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum occupies the 1823 apothecary of Louis Dufilho Jr., the first licensed pharmacist in the United States. The two floors are packed with nineteenth-century medical equipment: leech jars, apothecary cabinets full of herbal remedies and patent medicines, surgical tools, and a marble soda fountain installed in 1855 — when pharmacists dispensed soda water as a medicinal treatment. The courtyard garden grows medicinal plants used in Creole medicine, including several with voodoo associations.
The museum is small — allow an hour — but densely interesting and genuinely odd. It captures the period when medicine was transitioning from folk remedy and superstition toward science, when a good pharmacist mixed voodoo potions alongside laudanum, and when the line between healer, poisoner, and showman was not always clear. The building itself, a Creole townhouse with the original apothecary fittings, is one of the best-preserved nineteenth-century interiors in the French Quarter.