Page 9 - Pharmacy History 37 Nov 2009

rooms in Swanston Street Melbourne, the start of the Victorian College
of Pharmacy, and later began the Australasian Journal of Pharmacy which carried local and overseas news and promoted and published results of pharmaceutical investigation and experimentation.
The passage of poisons acts throughout the colonies represents the beginning of legal standards for pharmacy: they increased the claims of chemists to be the community’s custodians of poisons and led to some form of licensing of poisons sellers. In NSW the legislation
saw the creation of a Board of Pharmacy, which in effect was the Council of the recently reformed Pharmaceutical Society; in Victoria
it was accompanied by a separate Pharmacy Act which established
a Pharmacy Board responsible
not only for poisons, but for the regulation of the profession. This involved such things as the regulation of apprenticeship, education, examination and qualification. The idea of a pharmacy board, copied everywhere save Western Australia, was something new, in all cases representing the emergence of a self-governing and self-regulating occupation or profession. Apart
from the English impetus, around Australia, for similar reasons, chemists formed their societies and lobbied for poisons and pharmacy acts. The reasons that were articulated in Queensland applied generally:
a desire to limit retail competition from other storekeepers and from unqualified people presenting themselves as chemists to the
public. They also wanted to obtain exclusive rights to dispensing, against unqualified hospital dispensers and doctors’ wives. Associated with this were strenuous efforts to ensure
that pharmacy was not regulated by the medical profession, via medical boards. While Tasmania had the earliest licensed poisons sellers, it was the last Australian state to be finally released from medical oversight, in 1908.
In 1884, the Victorian Society proposed an inter-colonial conference
to establish country-wide standards in apprenticeship, education, examination, qualification and legislation. Friction between Victoria and NSW led to delays and the newly formed South Australian Pharmaceutical Society had to scrounge for the money to go to Melbourne in 1886. Fiji and New Zealand, invited, did not attend. This began what is now PAC, though it was to go through many changes of name, for many years being linked to the now defunct Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement
of Science. The national pharmacy conference somewhat fitfully encouraged investigation of the medical properties of native flora and fauna, JH Young of South Australia being a keen promoter of this in the early 20th century, followed by the Victorian Russell Grimwade during World War II. More positively it gradually led to the development
of relations of respect, rather than subservience, with the medical profession, to improved status for pharmacy in hospitals, and to the promotion of uniform standards, and the Australasian Pharmaceutical Formulary, as it was first known in 1902.
Begun in the powerhouse of the Victorian College of Pharmacy,
the APF was initially an attempt to shelter the manual dispensary against the threat of factory made medicines, such as cod liver oil emulsion. It also competed with formularies put out by Friendly Society Dispensaries, various hospitals and the later pharmaceutical benefits formulary
of the National Health Scheme from 1946. The Australian Pharmaceutical Formulary, as it became, and as it
was detached from the commercial interests of self-employed retail pharmacists, went through some quaint phases – advice on stain removal in 1947, for example. But the same edition set out a 10 page code for prescribing and dispensing practice, sections on doses including veterinary doses, a section on poisons and antidotes and on weights and measures. It provided the foundation
of such things as the national formularies during World War II which took account of shortages and other changes due to the war. It also provided stimulus for research in pharmaceutical formulation and new synthetic chemicals such as antiseptics in the various pharmacy departments in universities around the country, not just the Victorian College.
Increasingly, governments have imposed standards on pharmacy, especially in the politically-correct nanny-state of the moment. Apart from poisons and pharmacy acts, government imposed standards have involved weights and measures, pure food and drugs acts, dangerous drug acts, and such, always with
the added jumble and mess of different and differing state and federal jurisdictions. The old standards implied in the description ‘dispensing technique’ are now
called dispensing protocols and are arguably broader. The 1947 APF code that in dispensing ‘no substance of a deleterious nature is formed
by ... mixing [the] ingredients’
now expands to drug interactions, avoiding multiple dosing of same drug under different names, compliance, safe storage and so
forth. Given its humble and rough beginnings, it is a matter of some surprise to realise how successful pharmacy has been in influencing or determining and maintaining and improving its professional standards. This is even more surprising given the cut-throat commercial competition chemists have always faced in
the market, especially from other pharmacists.
volume 5 no 37 NOVEMBER 2009
Pharmacy History Australia 9