VOA常速英语:Potions of Yore Preserved in Small US Museum

For more than 140 years, from the late 1700s to the 1930s,the family-owned Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary served customers with an amazing assortment of medicines. When the shop closed, the building’s new owner kept it just the way it was and turned it into a museum.
从十七世纪末到二十世纪三十年代，其间一百四十多年来，由家族所有的Stabler-Leadbeater药商博物馆为顾客提供了种类繁多的药品。原有的商店停业后，这里的新主人将其保持原样，并把它打造成了博物馆。

A lot of the medicines that people would have been purchasing here were probably for minor, ailments, rashes, skin conditions, the flu, a headache. The apothecary museum contains thousands of items. They include bloodletting tools and cobalt glass bottles to store poisonous liquids. Like a modern drugstore, the apothecary sold more than just medicine.Lots of other chemicals like paints and dyes and perfumes would have been made and sold here.
人们在这里购买药物，很多可能都是用来治疗一些小病，比如皮疹、皮肤病、流感、头痛等等。药商博物馆里陈列着成千上万样物品，包括采血工具和储存有毒液体的钴蓝色玻璃瓶。就像现代药店一样，这里不仅售卖药品，同时也制造和销售许多其他的化学物质，如油漆、染料和香水。

But other items like sewing machines and pens and razors and baby bottles were sold here as well. On the store’s original shelves are dozens of gold leaf labeled hand blown glass bottles for liquids. These bottles have probably been part of this pharmacies collection since the 1850s.A number of them have traces of residue from the ingredients, others amazingly still contain liquids that go back decades,including cinnamon for nausea, iodine and antiseptic and opium which is derived from the poppy flower.
除此之外，这里还会售卖诸如缝纫机、笔、剃须刀和奶瓶等其它物品。这里原始的货架上有几十个用来存储液体的金标手吹玻璃瓶。这些瓶子可能是自十九世纪五十年代以来这间药房的部分收藏。其中一些含有微量的成分残留，另一些则仍然存有几十年前放置其中的液体，十分令人惊讶。这些物质中包括能治愈恶心呕吐的肉桂、碘、消毒剂和从罂粟花中提取的鸦片。

Opium was a very effective painkiller and it would often be used to treat the flu or dysentery. The upstairs room looks like something out of a Harry Potter movie with its old wooden boxes and drawers for storing herbs and other botanicals. Aconite or wolfsbane was a topical pain reliever.
鸦片是一种非常有效的止痛药，经常被用来治疗流感或痢疾。楼上的房间看上去就像哈利波特电影中的场景，里面有老旧的木箱和抽屉，用来存放草药和其他植物。乌头或狼毒是局部止痛药，

But in the wizardly world, the plant helps control violence by werewolves during their full moon transformations. So if you have more wolf trouble, it gets you through to the next full moon, but the practical use was for gout and joint pain. And then there’s dragon’s blood used for making potions in the Potter series, but Dragon’s Blood actually comes from a tree whose red resin was mostly used as a varnish. These dried wild carrot tops help reduce inflammation.
但在魔法世界里，这种植物能够帮助控制狼人在满月变身期间的暴力行为。所以在魔法世界里，它可以帮助狼人度过满月期间，但是其实际用途是可以用来治疗痛风和关节疼痛。在《哈利波特》系列中，龙血可以用来制造魔水，但龙血实际上采自一棵树，这种树上的红色树脂主要用作清漆。这些干燥的野生胡萝卜头有助于减轻炎症，

Which looks surprisingly, probably like they would have looked like when they were originally packaged and sent. This visitor from California is intrigued by the variety of plants which include cannabis, the marijuana plant. Using all these different herbs and, like, you know, plant-based medicines,that are like coming back now and like people are, you know, more into the holistic.So for me that’s personally most interesting to me because I work in the cannabis industry. While some medicines were discarded after it was known they were toxic. We still rely on others for today’s modern remedies.
令人惊讶的是，它们看起来就像最初被包装好然后寄送时的样子。这位来自加州的游客对包括大麻在内的各种植物都很感兴趣。所有这些不同的草药、这些植物制成的药物终于回归我们的生活中，感觉就像人们进入了整体医学。我个人对这方面非常感兴趣，因为我在大麻行业工作。但是人们发现有些药物有毒后，就会丢弃这些有毒药物。我们如今的现代治疗仍然要依赖其它药物

Deborah Block VOA News Alexandria Virginia
美国之音记者Deborah block于弗吉尼亚州亚历山大报道