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an interest in education and more importantly the student leaders became widely known.
The student’s awareness of the importance of the education question was sharpened by their realisation
of the unsatisfactory nature of their current course.
For example, in the age of penicillin and the new sulpha drugs, lectures and examinations concentrated on gentian root, iodine and iron.
There was no course in bacteriology and in their practical classes, students were not shown the techniques of sterile dispensing and other advances in pharmaceutics as a science.
The qualifying examination, which was then set and examined by the Pharmacy Board, was extremely difficult and large numbers of students failed. These students by now had finished their apprenticeship and their university studies and were forced to live in a nether world,
and to present themselves time and again before they passed and became eligible for registration.
One of the NSW examiners, known to the students as ‘granite Smith’, earned the awe but not the respect of these students. He was a tough and unnerving examiner who used his position to maintain what he saw as important and set high standards of manual dexterity in pharmaceutics. His unpopularity and his close association with the Federated Pharmaceutical Services Guild (later the Pharmacy Guild of Australia) may have added spice to the students’ later criticisms of that organisation.
Most of those who wanted to change the shape of post-war pharmacy were students during or shortly after the war. At this time, there was constant discussion of pharmacy education around the nation particularly
with regard to establishing a full- time pharmacy degree course and abandoning the old apprenticeship system.
To stir things along, Les Cashen stood at the 1949 Pharmacy Board elections but he was soundly defeated. In
Student’s magazine The Mortar
the lead up to the election, Cashen, had publically attacked the NSW Guild committee by claiming that
it was opposed to apprentices being given time off from work to attend orientation week at the university
or to granting them a week’s study vacation before examinations. Some employers denied their apprentices any extra time off on those days when they had to sit for their qualifying examinations and it was work as usual on the morning before, or the afternoon following sitting for their papers.
In 1948, as part of his attempt to form a national student body, the newly qualified Les Cashen had written a letter which was published in the Australasian Journal of Pharmacy, and in which he placed blame for the delay in the formation of the national student body on the Guild. Cashen claimed that official pharmacy was slow to respond to change.
Correspondence between Cashen and the Guild leaders was at times quite brusque, but the difficulty was that Guild membership was only open to those who owned a pharmacy and the leaders of pharmacy organisations were all employers, who, with business demands, had no leisure, and no time to reflect on the issues facing pharmacy.
By publishing Cashen’s views, the Australasian Journal of Pharmacy had exposed a lively issue, but its editor quickly grew timid and moved to stifle discussion of the issues which had been raised. He noted that
the privileges pharmacy enjoyed depended upon its professionalism
and he seriously wondered if there had been any falling off in professional standards.
To the reformers, like Cashen
and his cohorts, it appeared that practicing pharmacists were divided into commercial or professionally oriented groups according to which organisation they most favoured.
Their opponents regarded the reformers as ‘woolly student idealists’ but with equal intolerance and a
lack of understanding, some of
the reformers saw the supporters
of the status quo as ‘barnacles’,
or ‘commercial moguls’ who were destroying the profession which they, the reformers, had recently chosen.
IJ Thompson, chairman of the Guild Federal Public Relations Committee replied to Cashen by pointing out that it was a young man’s era, but students were not the only group with the interests of pharmacy at heart, experience was also necessary and Thompson praised the voluntary efforts which leaders in pharmacy had made. Another respondent claimed that Cashen was uninformed as well as disgruntled. With truer realism, the Australasian Journal of Pharmacy asked for tolerance, and pointed out that better business management could
be the basis for better pharmaceutical service. Cashen replied in a way which indicated how central the education question was to students and young pharmacists.
Among the lessons have we have learnt from the past in this story is the necessity for a uniform course of study and the need for better liaison between pharmaceutical organisations and tutorial bodies.
We have advanced already to having a national registration data base and an organisation to assess overseas qualified pharmacists wanting to practice in Australia.
The birth of NAPSA
The time was ripe for change and one of Cashen’s driving ambitions was to revitalise student societies
22 Pharmacy History Australia
volume 5 no 37 NOVEMBER 2009