Page 16 - Pharmacy History 29 July 2006

(Cont. from page 15)
superintendent. Both were residential positions requiring 70 set hours a week; with one being on call at all times. By 1930, the hospital had grown to 216 beds.
On May 5, 1907 Frederick Staubwasser wrote to the home secretary’s department in Brisbane requesting both a salary increase and a cottage in the hospital grounds, as he was to be married in December that year and his prospects in the Diamantina Hospital were more settled. Miss Chatfield also sent a supporting letter and the request was approved in 1908. The works department built the cottage and it was occupied by Mr and
Mrs Staubwasser in early 1909.
Dispenser’s House
1909-1923
The provision of the cottage in the hospital grounds was a clear indication of their great support and confidence the superintendent and the home secretary had in Frederick Staubwasser.
Of Miss Chatfield, he notes “At the Diamantina Hospital I met Miss Chatfield and from the first day I could see that we would work well together.”
On Miss Chatfield’s retirement in 1934, Frederick Staubwasser was made superintendent, and another dispenser appointed. A further indication of
his strong support from the home
secretary was his added appointment in 1933 as acting secretary of the Mount Isa Hospital when it opened, and he continued when it opened for about a year until it was properly established.
Frederick Stubwasser was naturalised as an Australian citizen in July 1912, and although he had completed all
the requirements for registration as a pharmacist/dispenser in Queensland in 1901, he was not formally registered by the Pharmacy Board until 1927.
No reason can be found in archives of the Pharmacy Board of Queensland or Pharmaceutical Society of Queensland for this long delay, but
it is noteworthy that neither of these
Disapenser’s House 1909-1923
16 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 3 ■ no 29 ■ JuLY 2006
Diamantina Hospital, Brisbane Queensland
bodies had any records of anyone who had failed the examination conducted by the Pharmaceutical Society or College of Pharmacy. However, registration required an apprenticeship followed by examination.
The turbulent history of pharmaceutical training from 1884
is well documented in the Centennial History of the Pharmaceutical Society of Queensland. Published in 1980,
it notes that most of the difficulties came from state politicians and the territorial ‘war’ by some leaders of the medical profession
It stabilised when pharmacy training became a course at the University
of Queensland from 1960. Also there is no suggestion that hospital pharmacists were exempt from the requirements pertaining to other contemporary pharmacists, and
that no registered pharmacist was employed at the Diamantina Hospital until 1934, when Staubwasser became superintendent.
Ironically, the Brisbane Hospital
in 1904 employed Mr D.F ‘Pa’
Brown as pharmacist, but as he was unable to pass the pharmaceutical examination he could not be registered in Queensland. When the hospital employed a registered pharmacist to work over him, it is a little surprising that this did not alert the home secretary to the anomaly.