In Kamal al-Shaikh’s 1954 suspense film, Hayat aw Mawt, a pharmacist mistakenly dispenses a poisonous compound rather than the medication a young girl had been sent to collect for her father. The camera follows the child and the pharmacist’s emissary on different routes through Cairo with a rising sense of urgency rooted in the city chemist’s shop: who will reach her father first to kill or to save him? Pharmacists or chemists became more prominent as urban figures with the founding of medical schools in early 19th-century Cairo and the move of the College of Medicine from Abu Zaabal to Qasr al-Aini, and the increasing power of chemical compounds to kill or save elevated the position of the pharmacist, though to a lower level than the heroic doctor. In terms of everydayness, however, it was not the doctor’s office but the pharmacist’s shop, with its vitrine displaying the sparkling clean, scientific interior of the new apothecary, that most people saw as they moved around the city. By the 1890’s, foreign chemists were joined by Egyptian pharmacists in spreading the gospel of science over superstition. The centuries-old city habit of going first not to a doctor, but to a traditional botanist's shop, was transferred to pharmacies through public education in schools, print, and images about the benefits of new “scientific” compounds. Part of a larger project on the transition from botanical to synthetic chemical pharmacology in Europe, Ottoman territories, and Egypt through the 1920’s, this paper examines pharmacists as transitional figures in popular understandings of medicine, as embodiments of a new masculinity based in scientific expertise, and as cosmopolitans of science featuring in the modern display culture of downtown Cairo. Analytically, the paper engages recent work by Nancy Gallagher on the intermingling of foreign and local goods in Egypt’s marketplace; Eissenstadt’s and downstream ideas of multiple modernities; Marwa el-Shakry’s exploration of a universal language of science expressed in local venaculars; and work such as Wilson Chacko Jacob’s and Lucie Ryzova’s on Egyptian masculinities. Evidence is drawn from curriculum and textbooks of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the College of Medicine, professional publications of instructors and practitioners, advertisements and feature articles in illustrated magazines, coverage in The Lancet, still and moving photography, travel guides, and comparative empirical work done in these sources for Beirut and Istanbul.