Links between profession and family in the community of Lithuanian pharmacists at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries

Little research has been carried out in the sphere of the relations between a pharmaceutical career and family in the historiography of pharmacy history. A peculiar influence of family on the choice of the pharmaceutical way of life came into existence in the period of Lithuanian national revival at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. This article aims to reveal the relations between a Lithuanian family and pharmaceutical career, to analyze the influence of political, social, economic factors on these relations. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th the resistance of Lithuanian peasants against Russification, Polonification manifested in their objective to form Lithuanian intelligentsia. Priestly seminaries became the major centre for preparing new Lithuanian intelligentsia. It was prestigious to become a priest. Moreover, this profession guaranteed material wealth. Young people often left the seminary and started their work in pharmacies where they got a shelter and small 5 rubles earning of a pharmacy apprentice. Such runaways from parents settled in the university cities of czarist Russia and had a purpose to become self-dependent (i.e. to get education) without parents’ support. The choice of a woman-pharmacist career, however, was greatly influenced by the profession of her husband. Some educated Lithuanian pharmacists encouraged their wives to choose the same specialty as theirs but such occasions were rare. Sometimes it happened so that pharmacists married, but there were only few Lithuanian women-pharmacists or assistants of pharmacists, and in the period of Lithuanian national revival the point of view on ethnically mixed families was negative. This article discusses about the career of women-pharmacists and the influence of family on the choice of a profession, as well as Lithuanian point of view on ethnically mixed families of pharmacists