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pounds a year. At the Launceston General Hospital, trained female dispensers included Miss J.B. Wollen, 1906-07, Miss E.N. Sandford, 1907-09 and Miss J. Freeman, 1909-12. The Victorian Australasian Journal of Pharmacy also noted in 1915: ‘Miss [Ethel] Drew qualified in June, 1915, and is now dispenser at the Queen Victoria Hospital’. A Victorian Women Pharmacists’ Association was established in 1905 and in 1911 it reported ‘Almost without exception all the principal hospitals in Victoria now employ women as head dispensers’.
A similar organisation formed in Queensland in 1917.
by the Australasian Trained Nurses’ Association (ATNA) in 1899, there was limited education for most nurses about drugs. This information included such topics as lotions in common use and preparation of varying strengths, doses and actions of more commonly used hypnotics and the methods of administration, and dosage and effects of poisons such as morphia, strychnine, arsenic, belladonna, alcohol, chloroform, mercury, iodoform and carbolic acid. In the early years of the twentieth century, texts such as Emily Stoney’s Practical Materia Medica for Nurses started appearing in Australia;
they contained information on the classification of drugs, dose lists, poison emergencies and materia medica. These reinforced the position of nurses in being involved with dispensing. Dispensing was a useful skill for nurses especially at smaller
or country hospitals. The ATNA Journal of December 1914 showed advertisements for those with dispensing experience. One such read: ‘Certificated nurse, as Second Sister, with knowledge of dispensing, wanted. Salary £70 p.a. ... Matron, Walker Hospital, Parramatta River, Sydney’.
During WWI
In 1909, the Australian Army recognized the qualified pharmacists of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australasia. For service with field ambulances, the Army followed the British war establishment in which dispensers were non-commissioned officers. Moreover, the 1912 regulations (Military Order 408) provided for the appointment only
of compounders, not qualified dispensers. The Army sought men with a knowledge of Latin names for drugs and medicines, the instructions commonly employed in the use of these and poisons, and in prescription dispensing. Prospective compounders received about nine months of army training. In a slight to members of
the Pharmaceutical Society, soldiers who held civilian qualifications in pharmacy were acceptable to the army – just as compounders.
The Army Service of Compounders or, as it became, the Army Pharmaceutical Service, undertook
the technical, pharmaceutical tasks of the medical supply department. The Army expected its compounders to carry out duties that civil pharmacy apprentices and unregistered chemists routinely and easily performed – preparation of bulk stock of common mixtures, powders and ointments, packaging of tablets and pills. The
skill set was a very basic memory and dispensing technique process. Thus,
as Haines remarks, the Australian Army diminished the role of the chemist. Even the duty of dispensing became largely unnecessary through extensive use of medicines in tablet form and stock solutions. Haines
notes in his history that he pays little attention to the technical details of
the professional work involved during the war. However, such an discussion by Haines may have been useful given the distinct preparations, aperients, tonics and expectorants demanded by military Senior Medical Officers even though a full supply of drugs of similar therapeutical value were on hand.
The Australian Imperial Force
(AIF) had two trained male Staff Sergeant Dispensers in charge of
all medical and surgical supplies, drugs and medicines on the general hospital establishment. A Sergeant Compounder, mostly a trained chemist, would take charge of the dispensary with a Corporal Dispenser to assist him. Their duties were to properly dispense the ‘number nines’ and other prescriptions written in War Book (Com. M.F. Book 50), including writing the amount of the dose on the label. Nurses or medical orderlies then would collect the necessary quantity of medicines for their patients for twenty-four hours.
This paper therefore brings to light those nurses who played a part in the history of pharmacists and reveals one of the many diverse areas of work for nurses in the AANS in WWI.
While the AIF rejected female dispensers for overseas service, even early in 1915, AANS members such
as Valerie Woinarski took on the role. While serving on the Guildford Castle, a British hospital ship off the coast of Turkey during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, she recalled that ‘no dispenser had been shipped so we had to make all our own solutions’. This role was more
Miss Jane Bell
Nurse dispenser training
The Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney was proactive in developing nurses with dispensing skills. In 1890, the nursing course consisted of seventy- seven lectures including materia medica – the science of drugs or pharmacology. In 1899, the Prince Alfred introduced a postgraduate fourth year of training which included dispensing. It was a course of six weeks specially designed for nurses, later reduced to two weeks, and successful students received a special dispensing certificate. Miss Jane
Bell, later Matron of the Melbourne Hospital and a Matron in the AANS during WWI completed this course.
However, even with the advent of a prescribed schedule of nursing study
4 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 4 ■ no 34 ■ February 2008