Historical remnants — Warning: may contain mercury
Living with a foreigner makes me look at things a bit differently, I pay more attention to my surroundings and try to find ways to immerse my partner into the Finnishness of Finland. The museums of Turku make this easy.
The Qwensel House and the Apothecary Museum
The Qwensel house is the oldest wooden house in Turku; it was built around 1700 in an area reserved for officials of the court of appeals, county executives, and the noble. The house is among the best preserved houses from that era in the whole of the Nordic countries.
The first known occupant of the house was Wilhelm Johan Qwensel. Mr. Qwensel was a court of appeals assessor. After him, the house was home to the Pipping family. Josef Gustav Pipping was a professor of medicine as well as Finland's first professor of surgery, and he was also made noble and received the -sköld ending for his last name (from Pipping to Pippingsköld). He lived in the Qwensel house from 1789 until his passing in 1815.
The current decor of the Qwensel house is a mixture of Rococo and Gustavian styles, which was fashionable at the time when the Pippings lived there.
The area was lucky to survive the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 and people began calling it the Fortuna quarter, as it was quite literally favored by luck. The following year, a merchant ship owner Nils Friedrich Tjäder bought the Qwensel house. Tjäder converted the additional wing (built by the Pippings) into a business space, which it stayed as for decades to come.
The Apothecary Museum is now located in the "business wing" part of the Qwensel house. It seems that neither the house or the people who lived there had any ties to a pharmacy, and there is no information about a pharmacy operating in that space back in the day, which I found a bit strange.
Our favourite part of the museum was this room with dried herbs hanging from the ceiling along with notes stating the name of the herb and the symptoms they were meant to treat, and boxes that you could lift the top off and take a sniff at the contents; some of them made you immediately regret doing so.
In addition to the permanent exhibitions, they are also showing a temporary exhibition called "Life, Death and Mercury" until March 2, 2025. It is crazy to me how people just didn’t know that mercury is poisonous but instead thought of it as a remedy to multiple health issues, such as skin diseases, STI’s, and other ailments. It was also used in beauty products. Can you imagine lathering your skin with a literal poison, thinking it’s making you more attractive? That is wild to me.
As mercury was shipped from overseas, when a ship full of the liquid metal was capsized its contents were lost... but not really. Nowadays, fish contain mercury, and there are suggested limitations for how much fish should be consumed to avoid getting too much mercury but to also be able to enjoy the health benefits of eating fish.
"Life, Death and Mercury" is based on the “Tie meren yli” project that was completed by the University of Turku in collaboration with Åbo Akademi, and a new study by Laura Hollsten regarding the use of mercury and the role it had in world trade in the 18th century.
