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formalised when Standing Orders for Sea Transport Nurses in 1917 detailed that ships could employ nurses in ship dispensaries. It made sense, as the Sister was responsible for dispensary stock. Nurses in Egypt obviously worked
in pharmacies there. Elsie Eglinton when confronted with the rush of wounded from Gallipoli in May 1915 at the Citadel Indian Hospital, Cairo wrote: ‘The Dispensaries have been closed round about so as the nurses could come here to help us’. Some of the nurses were not without first-rate dispensing skills. Australian Army nurse Kathleen Erwood had three and a half years experience in charge of a large dispensary while working in Turkey before the war. Women other than nurses also moved into hospitals as dispensers during the war. The British Army’s General Service Voluntary
Aid Detachment workers took up dispensing in both civil and military hospitals.
Obviously, those in the Australian pharmacy industry did not look favourably upon the work of nurses both in Australia and overseas
in dispensing and compounding drugs. In Victoria in October 1917, deputations from the Pharmacy Board, the Pharmaceutical Society, the Pharmaceutical Defence Limited, the Bendigo Chemist’s Association and the Ballarat Chemists’ Association sought a modification to the Nurses’ Registration Bill. They desired the addition of a clause that nurses were not to prescribe drugs, dispense
or compound drugs, nor qualify
to practise medicine, surgery or pharmacy, except in cases of an emergency where a doctor or chemist were not available. The Health Minister rejected the amendment.
The demand for dispenser qualifications for nurses did not diminish with the end of the war. Sister Valerie Rowe
was one of three AANS nurses who trained as a dispenser in England before returning to Australia. In addition, country hospitals in Western Australia in the 1930s still employed matrons
to manage their dispensary with the hospital supplying most of the liquid medications.
In conclusion, hospitals did employ Australian nurses as dispensers, particularly when trained pharmacists
were not available. The circumstances of WWI also led to the lack of qualified personnel and it was in
this regard that military nurses and others had the opportunity to work as dispensers. 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.
10. Gregory Haines, Pharmacy in Australia – the national experience, The Australian Pharmaceutical Publishing Co. Ltd, Sydney, 1988, p 188.
11. Schultz, p 269. 12. Haines, p 204. 13. Haines, p 203. 14. Schultz, p 122.
15. Dorothy Armstrong, The First Fifty Years, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Graduate Nurses’ Association, Sydney, 1965, p 84; Schultz, p 256 citing Prince Alfred hospital, Sydney. Eighteenth annual general meeting 27/2/1900, Appendix B.
16. Armstrong, p 84.
17. Jennifer A. Williams and Rupert D. Goodman, Jane Bell, O.B.E. (1873-1959), The Royal Melbourne Hospital Graduate Nurses’ Association, Melbourne, 1988, p 6 citing La Trobe Library, MS 10334.
18. Extract from ‘ATNA Rules and Regulations & Schedule
of Study’ [WA Branch, 1908] in Victoria Hobbs, But Westward Look- Nursing in Western Australia 1829-1979, University of Western Australia Press, for the Royal Australian Nursing Federation (W.A. Branch), Perth, 1980, Appendix III, p 230.
19. Emily A.M. Stoney, Practical Materia Medica for Nurses, W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia and London, 1911.
20. The Australasian Nurses’ Journal, Vol XII, No 12, The Australasian Trained Nurses Association, Sydney, 15 Dec 1914, p 418.
21. Butler, p 521.
22. Haines, p 190.
23. Butler, p 502.
24. Haines, p 207.
25. Haines, p 208.
26. Haines, p 189.
27. Butler, p 489.
28. Butler, pp 498-499.
29. Jan Bassett, ‘Ready to Serve – Australian Women and
the Great War’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, Issue 2, 1983, p 9; James W. Barrett and P.E. Deane, The Australian Army Medical Corps in Egypt, H.K. Lewis & Co. Ltd, London, 1918, p 195; ANJ, 15 Apr 1916, p 124.
30. Lt. Col. H.S. Stacy, Unofficial History of the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, Part I, The University of Melbourne Museum of Medicine, c1938, p 5; ‘Army Medical Nursing – Notes on Management of Field Hospital’, in Una – The Journal of the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses’ Association, Vol XI, No. 4, 30 June 1913, Melbourne, p 89; Patrick M. Hamilton OBE, Riders of Destiny: The 4th Australian Light Horse Field Ambulance 1917–1918 – An Autobiography and History, 2nd Edition, Mostly Unsung Military History Research and Publications, Melbourne, 1996, p 52.
31. ‘Army Medical Nursing – Notes on Management of Field Hospital’, in Una, 30 Jun 1913, p 89; J.H. Tull Walsh, ‘Section II – Nursing’ in W. Byam and R.G. Archibald (eds), The Practice of Medicine in the Tropics by Many Authorities, Vol 1, Henry Frowde/Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1921, p 253. ‘No 9’ was a laxative.
32. ‘In a French Typhoid Hospital’ in Nursing Mirror, reprinted in Una, Vol XIV, No. 5, 29 July 1916, p 148.
33. Australian War Memorial AWM41 1060, Sister V. Woniarski [sic].
34. Army Nursing Services, Australian Imperial Force, Extracts from Regulations and Orders, issued with M.O. 471/1917, Sea Transport Nursing Staff, p 9.
35. Butler, p 693.
36. AWM PR 86/068, E.A. Eglinton, p 36, letter to Dear Mother from Alexandria, 23 May 1915.
37. National Archives of Australia (NAA) B2455 personal
file, Kathleen Erwood. Nurses from other countries also worked as dispensers. See Maria Naepflin, “Morphium”
in Fortgerungen, durchgedrungen bis zum Kleinod hin (Meiningen: Loeptien, 1922), 73-74, 99-102, in Margaret R. Higonnet (ed), Lines of Fire – Women Writers of World War I, Plume (Penguin Putnam Inc), New York, 1999, p 233.
38. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens – British women as military nurses 1854-1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1988, p 269.
39. ‘Changes in Nurses’ Bill not Favored [sic] by Minister’,
in Herald, 10 Oct 1917 in RVCN Newspaper Cuttings, 1918-1927, University of Melbourne Archives; ‘Deputation to Minister of Health’ in Una, Vol XV, No. 8, 30 October 1917, p 244.
40. NAA B2455 personal file Valerie Rowe. This was a Non- Military Employment (NME) course.
41. Hobbs, p 84.
Dr Kirsty Harris can be contacted at k.harris@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
References
1. A.G. Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services 1914-1918, Volume III - Special Problems and Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1943, p 500.
2. Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: the history of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps, 1902-1988 (Brisbane: Boolarong Publications, 1988); Marianne Barker, Nightingales in the Mud - The Digger Sisters of the Great War 1914-1918 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989); Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches - Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia, 1992).
3. Butler, p 488.
4. Butler, pp 490, 497.
Bartz Schultz, A Tapestry of Service – The Evolution of Nursing in Australia, Volume I Foundation to Federation 1788-1900, Churchill Livingstone, Melbourne, 1991, p 122. St Vincent’s, Sydney, 1873.
5. Joan Durdin, They Became Nurses – a history of nursing in South Australia 1836-1980, North Sydney, 1991, pp 26-27 quoting Interview with C. Watt, M. Pearce, 11 September 1984, by Joan Durdin, held in the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection, Mortlock Library of South Australiana.
6. Margaret Barbalet, The Adelaide Children’s Hospital 1897-1976, The Adelaide Children’s Hospital, Adelaide, 1975, p 95. Sister Von Doussa worked in the dispensary in 1916.
7. Barbalet, pp 89, 95.
8. E.W. Gault and Alan Lucas, A Century of Compassion – A history of the Austin Hospital, The Macmillan Company of Australian Pty Ltd, South Melbourne, 1982, p 42.
9. Clifford Craig, Launceston General Hospital – First Hundred Years 1863-1963, Board of Management of the Launceston General Hospital, 1963, p 64.
volume 4 ■ no 34 ■ February 2008
Pharmacy History Australia ■ 5