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A bowl with a grinding club resting in it, marking pharmacy and compounding.
Also known as: Apothecary symbol
The mortar and pestle stands for pharmacy in the English-speaking world, from an age when a pharmacist ground and mixed the medicine rather than counting it out. It survives as a trade symbol long after the practice it depicts became rare.
Identifies a pharmacy or pharmacist, particularly in Britain, North America and Australia, and is used in the crests of several pharmaceutical bodies.
Depicts compounding — grinding and mixing a preparation by hand — which was the pharmacist's ordinary work for centuries and is now a specialist activity.
A deep rounded bowl, wider at the rim than the base, with a heavy club-shaped rod leaning out of it at a diagonal.
Both identify pharmacy, and both are bowls — but the bowl of Hygieia has a snake coiled about it and the mortar has a pestle.