Page 4 - Pharmacy History 29 July 2006

As a result, the flow of convicts was mainly diverted to Van Diemen’s Land with a small number being sent to Norfolk Island, Port Phillip and Western Australia.
More free settlers were also being attracted to Van Diemen’s Land and as a result considerable extra pressure was placed on the available medical and hospital services, so much so that the principal medical officer at the time, Dr John Clarke, sent a despatch to the home authorities in England appealing for help to improve local conditions and emphasising the need for new hospitals for Hobart Town and Launceston.
He was offered some half pay army and navy medical officers, but he declined and recommended instead that practitioners for the medical services be recruited from among the sons of the colonists.5
Presumably they would be trained by the existing medical officers!
As well as medical men of the official world, there was also increasing interest by entrepreneurial doctors who came to care for the free community in Van Diemen’s Land. The forerunner of these was Thomas Birch, the surgeon on the whaler Dubuc, which arrived in 1808.
After a survey when it docked, the ship was declared unseaworthy and could not leave Hobart Town, so Birch set up as a merchant rather than as a medical man, although he gave his professional services free to the poor.
He amassed a fortune trading in Huon pine, seal skins, whale oil and any other cargo he could find to fill his ships.
During this period, whaling and sealing vessels, many from America, were constant visitors to Sydney and Hobart Town especially during the winter season. These vessels were reasonably well provisioned and self contained and it was usually one
of the cook’s duties to concoct and dispense medicines for the crew. These enterprises gradually became shore-based and at times the cook’s qualifications became embellished to the point where they were passed off as doctors.6
Another early arrival around this 1830 period was Dr John Margetts, who was listed as an apothecary.
Margetts may have been one of those medical men who had undertaken further studies at the Society of Apothecaries in London and would have been entitled to use the post- nominal, LSA – Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries.
Many naval surgeons, on their retirement from service, obtained an apothecary’s licence in order to set up in general practice for a living.
In Britain, long before convict transportation to Australia was instituted, a three-fold division had developed in the medical profession, that of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. Physicians could treat and prescribe for internal illnesses and were the favourites of the upper classes. The surgeon’s business was operating, and they could prescribe and dispense medicines only for external use.
Apothecaries gradually took up
the role we would now regard as
that of the family doctor or general practitioner. The new terms were
not widely employed until the mid to late 19th century, and the old meanings of apothecary and surgeon- apothecary had by then all but disappeared.
Despite this however, some apothecaries continued to concentrate successfully on the business of pharmacy. For example an apothecary in England founded the major pharmaceutical business of Allen & Hanburys in 1715.
A key feature of the movement of apothecaries into the general practice of medicine was the retention of their tradition of compounding and
dispensing medicines, rather than writing a prescription to be dispensed elsewhere. As a consequence, the emerging general practitioner not only carried out consultation and diagnosis, he also dispensed and supplied any medicines that he regarded as being necessary for treatment.7
In addition the surgeon druggists
in the employ of the Government hospitals used their influence to retain their profitable sideline of dispensing for their private patients. As a result, these two factors
alone meant that there was very
little opportunity for anyone with pharmaceutical knowledge or skills such as a dispenser or pharmacist,
as we would call them today, to set up in private practice in any of the Australian colonies, and make a living following their profession.
It took over 30 years since the first fleet arrived in Sydney Cove for someone to break this mould. It
was an emancipated convict John Tawell, who is recognised as the first person to start a pharmacy business in Australia.
Before he was transported to this country for possessing a counterfeit banknote, Tawell had been employed as a traveller for a firm of druggists and patent medicine wholesalers
in London. Here he had acquired some knowledge about drugs,
their properties and uses, as well
as the mode of preparing them for medicinal use.
On his arrival in Sydney he was sent to work in the Convict Hospital
and within two years he obtained
his ticket of leave, which lead to his emancipation and freedom.
Aided by some friends, Tawell rented a shop in the heart of Sydney and in the Sydney Gazette on February 26 1820 he advertised that he was open for business.
In later advertisements he also stated that he was ‘an apothecary from London and that his qualifications were neither unprofessional or irregular’.
Not long after he commenced his business in Sydney, he was called to appear before a Medical Board of three surgeons, to be examined to see if he was fit to dispense medicines.
4 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 3 ■ no 30 ■ NOVEMBER 2006