The antique books donated by the Botanical Garden in the 1920s to the Institute of Pharmacology and kept at the Library of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences of the University of Padova are mainly medical texts and they provide an overview of the history of medicine from its origins to the entire eighteenth century: the exhibition makes it possible to get a bird’s-eye view of the main stages of the discipline’s evolution, illustrated with a timeline.

> fathers of medicine

The exhibition has selected and exhibits some strands of medicine: domestic medicine, unofficial traditionally transmitted by books, secrets, epidemics, particularly the plague, smallpox and syphilis, thermalism and the representation of human body as a show.

> alternative medicine

> epidemics

> thermalism

> monsters and monstrosities