'Pharmacy' comes from a word meaning 'drug,' 'poison,' and 'magic spell' — all one art in ancient Greece.
A shop or hospital dispensary where medicinal drugs are prepared and sold; also, the science of preparing and dispensing drugs.
From Greek 'pharmakeía' (φαρμακεία, the use of drugs or spells), from 'phármakon' (φάρμακον), a word of extraordinary semantic range: it meant simultaneously 'drug,' 'poison,' and 'magical charm or spell.' The Greek made no structural distinction between the healer, the poisoner, and the sorcerer — all three deployed 'phármaka' (substances of transformation). The root is Pre-Greek or possibly of Anatolian origin; no certain PIE ancestor has been reconstructed, though some scholars
Greek 'phármakon' meant simultaneously 'drug,' 'poison,' and 'magic spell' — ancient Greeks saw no boundary between these three concepts. When Plato described writing as a 'phármakon' in the Phaedrus, he meant it was ambiguously a cure, a poison, and an enchantment all at once. Every pharmacist works under a word
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