In 1820 he was apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Charles Vachell, a surgeon-apothecary in Cardiff. Vachell had married Redwood's eldest half-sister Margaret in 1811.
Redwood translated Karl Friedrich Mohr’s Lehrbuch der pharmaceutischen Technik,[2] and adapted it to English practice. This was the first textbook of pharmacy. The result was Practical Pharmacy: The Arrangements, Apparatus, and Manipulation of the Pharmaceutical Shop and Laboratory, by Francis Mohr and Theophilus Redwood, Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, London, 1849.[3]William Procter, Jr. edited an American edition for publisher Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia. Procter’s Practical Pharmacy was published in 1849.[4]
He was also Secretary of the Cavendish Society (1846–72) and Vice-President of the Chemical Society.
Theophilius Redwood was never President of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, but was President of the British Pharmaceutical Conferences in Glasgow and Plymouth, 1876 and 77. He was also President of the International Pharmaceutical conference held in London in 1881.
After his retirement in 1885, he received the title of Emeritus Professor by unanimous vote of the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society. He moved back to the family home in Boverton, which he had inherited, but still continued to lecture. His last public appearance was appropriately at the Pharmaceutical Conference in Cardiff in 1891, as he himself remarked, a very different Cardiff from the one he had left in 1823. He died at home on 5 March 1892 and is buried in the Llantwit Major churchyard.
^Higby, Gregory J. (1992). In service to American pharmacy: the professional life of William Procter Jr. Tuscaloosa u.a.: Univ. of Alabama Press, p 134. ISBN0817305912.
