Schmiederer studied pharmacy in Marburg, after which she took part in a postgraduate course on the history of pharmacy. While she was writing her dissertation, she also began working as a pharmacist. “They are actually two full-time jobs,” she says in retrospect. She points out that it was therefore very important to her that she found ideal conditions at Merck to conduct her work in a goal-oriented manner. She benefited from the good atmosphere at the large round table in Corporate History, the expert support from the employees at the department, and the archive’s a wide range of diverse documents. “You don’t just sit here amidst books from the 18th century,” says Schmiederer about the archive’s library. The fact that the collection brings together source material ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day “makes it much easier to bridge the gap to modern-day realities,” she says.

On the basis of her own experiences, Schmiederer encourages other scholars to use the library at Merck Corporate History when conducting research. The collection’s great diversity can be very beneficial, as Schmiederer discovered, for example, when she compared the contents of the Dictionnaire with those of contemporary pharmacopoeia during a later phase of her work. “The results were very fruitful,” she says.