Page 6 - Pharmacy History 29 July 2006

Uncle Robert’s medicine chest
By Geoff Miller
Our story begins with a home medicine chest which was used on a farm near Goulburn in NSW and was known to the family as Uncle Robert’s medicine chest, and was probably purchased around 1860.
This type of medicine box was a typical English design made of rosewood with a velvet lining.1
While the box itself is interesting and functional with its range of drugs and apparatus such as a pestle and mortar and hand held scales, it was usually kept in the house for use by the family doctor if he was called to treat a sick family member.
The fascinating thing about these medicine chests is not so much the chest itself but the bottles and their contents which give us an insight into contemporary medicine. The other story that these medicine chests have to tell is about their owners or the pharmacists who supplied the contents. In this particular story the drugs and medicines were provided by a Sydney chemist, Frederick Sloper. Frederick Evans Sloper, came to Australia from England in 1852.2
He was a member of the British Pharmaceutical Society, and as such he would have had credentials as to his
competency as a pharmacist. He opened his first pharmacy in Sydney at 50 William Street around 1858 and he was quickly involved in the group of local chemists who were agitating to form a pharmaceutical society in the colony. After prolonged negotiations with the government, The Sale and Use of Poisons Act was passed in 1876. This cleared the way for the formation of the Pharmaceutical Society
of New South Wales. The first President was WT Pinhey. Frederick Sloper was elected to the Council, the members of which also acted as the Board of Pharmacy until The Pharmacy Act was promulgated in 1897.
The Board of Pharmacy was responsible for the registration of the members of the new Society and Frederick Sloper was involved with WA Dixon , an analytical chemist, to establish a laboratory and to start a program of lectures for apprentices.
Due to some personal friction between these two, Sloper resigned from the Council in September 1877.
Frederick Sloper sold his William St pharmacy and returned to England, but in 1886 he came back to Sydney and opened a pharmacy at 94 Oxford St, which he retained until his death in 1903.
He lived at various addresses in Kensington3 and he rode a tricycle into work through Centennial Park and Randwick Road. Tricycles were thought to be safer for women and ‘more dignified’ for men like clergymen and doctors, than penny-farthing bicycles.
Returning to the medicine chest and its contents, some
of the preparations were Sloper’s own remedies, such as Antibillious Pills, which were also called After Dinner Pills. The most widely advertised remedy world wide, in this category were Beecham’s Pills.
Frederick Sloper MPS.
6 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 3 ■ no 30 ■ NOVEMBER 2006