Held on Thursday, 3 June 2027 at 6:30pm

Venue: Apothecaries' Hall, Black Friar's Lane, London EC4V 6EJ

Presenting Negotiating Expertise and Modernity in the Women’s History of Boots The Chemist (Elizabeth Garrett Anderson lecture)

To be given by Prof Anna Greenwood

Commencing as a humble herbalist shop in Nottingham in 1849, by the 1920s Boots The Chemists had grown to become Britain's largest retail chain pharmacy. A common feature of every British high street, Boots was a popular distributor of a huge variety of health, hygiene, and beauty products, as well as everyday domestic goods and gifts. Moving beyond examinations of Boots through the lens of business history, this short paper explores the company from a women’s history perspective, arguing that Boots empowered women with new professional identities and consumer choices while simultaneously reinforcing normative standards of beauty and domestic responsibility.

Anna Greenwood is Professor of Health History at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of several books and articles on topics ranging from the colonial medicine in British East Africa, medical consumerism, and the history of Boots. She currently leads a project on the unhealthy sponsorship of sport.

Presenting How British was pharmacy in the British Empire? (Hans Sloane Lecture)

To be given by Prof Stuart Anderson

In the nineteenth century pharmacy in Britain developed differently to that elsewhere in Europe as a result of apothecaries becoming general medical practitioners, leading to features that gave pharmacy a distinctly British character. A two-tier register of qualified practitioners was established, pharmacy regulation was linked to the control of poisons, and company chemists emerged after a Law Lords ruling in 1880. In this talk Stuart Anderson explores the extent to which the British model of pharmacy was reproduced in Britain’s colonies and dominions as the Empire expanded, and considers the nature of Britain’s pharmacy legacy following the attainment of independence.

Stuart Anderson is professor emeritus in pharmacy history at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine where he was previously Associate Dean of Studies. He has written extensively about the history of pharmacy, and is a Fellow of both the Royal College of Pharmacy and the Royal Historical Society.