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Pharmacy-practitioners were
also keen to have their expertise
and competence recognised and
the names and titles associated
with their activities – ‘chemist’, ‘druggist’, ‘dispenser’ and so forth protected so that only they could
use them. At first this was sought
by the profession of a title such as ‘chemist and druggist’ or by titling
a business as a ‘medical hall’. When the British settled Australia there were no laws governing the use of such titles as doctor, apothecary, chemist and druggist, and so forth. Nor were there legal standards as to the quality or bona fides of what was sold – substitution of a less expensive magnesium carbonate for the more expensive bismuth salt was scarcely unknown – and anyone who cared
to could sell anything. When ships arrived with cargoes of crude drugs, a chemist and druggist had to be
able to verify the authenticity of the product – gentian root, powdered opium, belladonna extract and to discern its quality. Some crude drugs brought in on speculation were thought to have crossed the equator stowed in a murky hold one time too many. They had to identify chemicals as well as crude drugs. All this was learned by experience guided by a master druggist, oilman, apothecary and so forth. There was only this informal recognition of standards.
Indeed, the first official recognition of pharmacy standards anywhere in the whole British Empire probably came in Sydney in 1820 when John Tawell was recognised.
Transported to Australia for the crime of forgery, he obtained a ticket-of- leave. In June 1820 a special medical board set up by Governor Macquarie reported:
We have examined all the Empir- ics who have come within our knowledge in Sydney, and find them totally ignorant of every branch of the Medical profes- sion with the exception of John Tawell who is qualified to act
as an Apothecary, and to whom we have given a Certificate of Qualification to Compound and dispense medicines.
Tawell had worked in England as a bagman, a commercial traveller, for a Quaker drug company.
He had a pharmacy in Hunter
Street Sydney by 1827 and, amongst others, fitted up medical chests for the Macarthurs of Camden. He
may also have imported and sold spirits illegally and was a public and financial supporter of the Quakers. He flourished, and after 15 years left the colony a rich man. On his return to England he became the first man arrested with the help of the new electric telegraph. He was executed for the murder of his mistress, Sarah Hart. Apparently his first attempt to poison her with morphia and porter failed but the second, with cyanide
in the stout, worked. Not a sound knowledge of doses, it seems from the first one who was qualified to act as an apothecary and dispense medicines in Australia.
England’s 1815 Apothecaries Act had repercussions for pharmacy, there and here. It recognised apothecaries as general medical practitioners, who also dispensed, in an age when patent and proprietary medicines, popularly advertised, were posing threats to the compounding activities of the druggist. The English response, the formation
of a pharmaceutical society, was to be echoed in Australia. Through the recognition of qualifications
as the basis for membership, the publication of papers and a journal and the promotion of lectures and encouragement of investigations in
an age when science was about to experience remarkable advances, these organisations were to prove able to set and maintain appropriate standards in the preparation of medicines and the custody of poisons.
The Pharmaceutical Society of
Great Britain was founded in 1841 and the society took premises at 17 Bloomsbury Square, London where a School of Pharmacy was established in which botany and materia medica were an important part of the curriculum. In 1843, Queen Victoria granted the Society its Royal Charter. In mid-1844 a group of Sydney pharmacists, led by Ambrose Foss, set up the first Pharmaceutical Society of NSW which arranged publications and lectures and sought affiliation with the English society. By 1849 it was unhappily defunct, mainly due to the economic depression experienced in the 1840s. But it had become
clear that events in England would strongly influence the development of pharmacy in Australia
The 1851 Arsenic Act in England gave rise to calls around Australia to place restrictions on the sale of virulent poisons, though the first change did not come until 1862 with the South Australian Poisons Act. However
in 1857, in gold rich Victoria, where there was a critical mass of scientifically learned pharmacists such as Cuthbert Blackett and Joseph Bosisto, a society, soon styled the ‘Pharmaceutical Society of Australasia’, was formed, and it flourished. It set up laboratories and
Table 2: Foundation of Societies and First Legislation
Colony
Society
Pharmacy
Poisons
ACT
ACT
NSW
1876
1897
1876
Qld
1880
1884
1888
SA
1885
1891
1862
TAS
1891
1908*
1867
VIC
1857
1876
1876
WA+
1892
1894
1879
* Chemists were licensed as poisons-sellers after 1849. From 1891 the Tasmanian Society began to examine pharmaceutical candidates seeking the Court of Medical Examiners’ certification.
+ In Western Australia, unlike all other colonies and like England, the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society was the registering authority: there was no separate Pharmacy Board.
8 Pharmacy History Australia
volume 5 no 37 NOVEMBER 2009