Page 17 - Pharmacy History 29 July 2006

Medicine and pharmacy in Tasmania in the early days Continued from page 5
Early chemists like John Wilkinson were not required to show their credentials and they could sell anything they liked, except alcohol.
At the persuasion of his colleagues, Wilkinson was eventually examined and registered by the Court of Medical Examiners just before his death in 1885, and ‘thus prevented an anomaly’. The fact that doctors and chemists were registered under an Act of Parliament, meant they were given a legal monopoly over the sale of drugs including patent medicines, much
to the chagrin of the grocers and storekeepers who were thus prevented from selling them. Such measures were claimed to be in the public interest and were not unlike the present
day system of scheduling drugs and poisons to control their sale.
The oldest known registration certificate for a pharmacist in the British Dominions, was issued by
the Court of Medical Examiners in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land,
on January 15 1846 to Landon Fairthorne to ‘carry on the business of a druggist in this island.’
Landon Fairthorn
Dr Pugh taught the young Landon chemistry and dispensing, and when the time was ripe he persuaded Fairthorne to apply to the Court of Medical Examiners of Van Diemen’s Land to be registered as a chemist and druggist.
This he did, and he immediately went to Longford, where he opened his first pharmacy. In 1846 he moved
to Launceston where he eventually operated pharmacies at a number of different addresses.
In 1859 he withdrew from active participation in the pharmacy business and pursued interests in shipping and mining following in the footsteps of Thomas Birch, mentioned earlier. Eventually Fairthorne returned to pharmacy, and from 1871 ran the business in partnership with his
son Frederick. The Fairthornes also branched out into wholesaling,
and the firm of Fairthorne and Son eventually became the Tasmanian branch of Drug Houses of Australia.
Fairthorne was mayor of Launceston in 1884, and also was elected president of the Intercolonial Pharmaceutical Conference which
was held in Melbourne in 1886.
This meeting was attended by delegates from all of the Australian colonies to seek among other things, uniform standards of pharmacy education as well as uniformity of laws regulating pharmacy and the sale of poisons.
Ironically, 120 years later such an ideal has still not been achieved.
Fairthorne died at Launceston in 1890 just before the Pharmaceutical Society of Tasmania was formed in 1891. His son Frederick became President of that body in 1896.13
Another of the giants of Tasmanian pharmacy was Henry Thomas Gould who arrived in Hobart in 1881.
HT Gould had served a five year apprenticeship to a chemist in England, and after success at the examinations of the Westminster College of Pharmacy, he was registered by the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. He then decided to use his qualifications to enable him to travel and to see the world.
Hobart appealed to him as a place to settle and his first task was to present his credentials to the Court of Medical Examiners. After receiving a license to ‘vend medicines and drugs in the Island of Tasmania’, Gould later commented that because he had a certificate from the Society of Apothecaries in London as well as one from the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, he could
as easily have been registered as an assistant to a doctor, instead of as a dispenser of medicines.14
The seven-member Court of Medical Examiners in 1885 comprised the most eminent members of the medical establishment, four of whom were Members of Parliament.
One member, Dr John Coverdale,
ran a dispensing medical practice at Richmond styled ‘the Dispensary and Morgue.’15
The Court of Medical Examiners
itself was unwilling however to admit chemists as members, which would have been tantamount to granting chemists equality, an anathema to most doctors at that time.
Now that he was licensed to vend drugs and medicines in Tasmania, Henry Gould joined the practice of Dr Benjafield, homoeopathist, at the homoeopathic pharmacy in Hobart, a business that Gould later bought.
Landon Fairthorne later became
the venerated elder statesman of Tasmanian pharmacy, after a career which started with his employment as a book-keeper with William Pugh, the innovative doctor who was the first to use ether as an anaesthetic for surgery in Australia.
volume 3 ■ no 30 ■ NOVEMBER 2006
Pharmacy History Australia ■ 1