One of the artifacts in the old dispensary where I’m currently working on the Pharmacy documentation project is an old Remington portable typewriter that was used in the 1930’s to type labels to be stuck on bottles of prescription medicine etc.

I’ve just noticed that it must be a pharmacist’s special model as it has some extra keys such as ℞ and a few others including exotica such as ℥ (ounce) and ℈ (scruple) …

Outside  of a blogpost on a specialist typewriter blog, I havn’t been able to find out a great deal about such specialist machines, except that they seem to be pretty rare.

On the other hand if you more are interested  in text transcription than typewriters, or indeed just how I got these weird symbols into WordPress, the Text Creation Partnership have a handy guide on the transcription and rendering apothecaries’ symbols as XML.