A Scandalously Short Introduction to the History of Pharmacy
Chapter 7 - The Australian Scene
It is not generally recognised that the first medical person to land on Australian soil was actually an apothecary. This man had plied his pills and potions in the Dutch city of Haalem, until at the age of 30 he gave up his profession and joined the Dutch East India Company fleet as an undermerchant, or second mate. His name was Jeromius Cornelisz, and he was the leader of the mutineers after the wreck of the Batavia on the Abroholos Islands off the coast of Western Australia.
When the first fleet arrived in Port Jackson in January 1788, the first batch of outcasts and their guards were in the care of naval doctors and the Surgeon General was John White. Within a few weeks of his arrival, White observed the aborigines in the area collecting the dark gum that exudes from the Red Gum tree Eucalyptus resinifera. When dried and dissolved in Spirit of Wine it was employed with moderate success as an astringent treatment for dysentery. It was called Tincture of Kino.
White also distilled an oil from the leaves of the "Sydney Peppermint”, Eucalyptus piperita, one of the many eucalypts growing around Sydney cove, and Governor Philip sent a sample back to England with an eye to a future export from the infant colony.
Despite the oil being more aromatic and less pungent than European specimens, it was not until 1852 that Joseph Bosisto, a pharmacist who had come out from Yorkshire in England in search of gold, decided to extract the oil commercially and he commenced operations in a crudely constructed still at Dandenong Creek in Victoria. For the next 80 years, Australia dominated the world eucalyptus market, and Bosisto's Eucalyptus Oil won prizes at 17 International Exhibitions. Eucalyptus Oil was the only distinctively Australian substance in the British Pharmacopoeia at the turn of the century.
Dispensing Doctors
Of the naval surgeons who came to Australia with the transport fleets, many of them spent a considerable time waiting around for a ship to take them home. They provided a modicum of medical care to the settlers, convicts and their guards whilst in the colony. Some of the convicts themselves had come from a medical background and their skills were used in the first hospitals in the colony as aides or dispensers.
This was the time when the major medical treatments were based on the surgeon's knife or the old stand byes of bleeding, sweating, vomiting and purging, and the use of drugs was very limited, there being only about 17 preparations considered necessary in the basic drug list for the convict garrison. For many years to come in Australia, the two professions of medicine and pharmacy were not in any way separate disciplines.
By 1840 there were at least six doctors who kept " dispensing shops" where they could be consulted. The first private doctors in Sydney were convicts who had received their pardons and one, William Redfern had considerable influence with Governor Macquarie. Redfern was employed at the Sydney Hospital and he also had a private practice. He supplied his private patients with medicines from the hospital stores. It was common practice for Doctors to take apprentices to do their bidding as well as their dispensing.
The First Private Pharmacies In Australia
In 1820 a Medical Board was established to examine the competence of anyone wishing to practice medicine as well as pharmacy, because the doctors were reluctant to relinquish a profitable part of their practice. It was this board which granted John Tawell, the man who opened the first chemist shop in Sydney in 1820, a certificate to practise as an apothecary and to compound and dispense medicines. He had presented himself as an apothecary from London, and that his qualifications were neither unprofessional or irregular. Tawell had been a travelling salesman for a patent medicine company in England, and had been transported for forgery. He had worked in the Sydney hospital until granted his pardon by the Governor, and would have been in contact with some of the medical establishment in the colony He was a good judge of business opportunities, and it was not long before his business prospered. He retired to England in 1845, where he was eventually hung for poisoning his mistress.
The best claim as to who opened the first pharmacy owned by a trained pharmacist belongs to Michael Bates, a Yorkshireman who started his pharmacy in Launceston in Tasmania ( or Van Dieman's Land) in 1825. This business still trades as Hatton & Laws Pharmacy today.
Tasmania was the first British colony to create a system of medical licensing and registration, as it enacted the first Medical Act in 1842, and the first Pharmacist registered in the British Dominions was Landon Fairthorne who received his license in Hobart on January 15th 1846.
In 1828 Tawell's business was sold to Ambrose Foss, who was unqualified but very well respected, being a deacon of the Congregational Church, and a member of the first Sydney Municipal Council. In 1844 he headed a group of Sydney pharmacists who formed the Pharmaceutical Society of New South Wales. This was the first such society outside England in the English speaking world, and was modelled on the similar group that had been formed in England a year earlier. The Sydney Society did not out-live the troubled decade of the 1840s, but it did indicate the way Australian pharmacy was to develop - imitating English practice.
We are starting to see both in England and Australia, the development of pharmacy as a profession separate from medicine, and also the movement towards a standard of qualification among practitioners that would give the public a reasonable degree of confidence in their competency.
The first pharmacist to come to Western Australia was George Shenton, who had been apprenticed to William Bilton in Portsea in England. Shenton arrived in 1833 and lived with his cousin William who operated the flour mill at Mill Point in South Perth. Shenton started his pharmacy in Hay Street but even after ten years of struggle, the colony only had 2000 settlers, hardly enough to support a dispensing business, so Shenton treated patients, counter prescribed and made medicines for horses, sheep and cattle. He also pioneered the export of Swan River mahogany (jarrah) and Sandalwood to London, as well as investing in lead and copper mining and banking. In 1843 another pharmacy opened in Perth, near Shenton's shop. This was owned by Dr.John Shipton, who had earlier been practising as a surgeon in Fremantle.
In the other Australian States there are also famous names that have a long history with the profession of Pharmacy.
In 1844 Francis Hardy Faulding, the son of a Yorkshire surgeon arrived in Adelaide, and set up a pharmacy. Within three years he also operated a warehouse and so became South Australia's first wholesaler. The company he founded is now a multinational pharmaceutical manufacturer, as well as a being a national wholesale operation.
In Victoria, which was originally the southern district of New South Wales, the Port Phillip Settlement was founded in 1835. Its first doctor and pharmacist was a Dr.Barry Cotter. Another claimant to the first pharmacy title was by a man who was not a "mere" surgeon, but a physician and a member of the Royal College of Physicians by examination.
In each State the gold rushes bought many who weren't qualified as the professional they claimed to be, and there was no organisation to control them. Whole towns would disappear almost overnight and then others would spring up with a new find.
The need to bring some sort of order to the selling of poisons and some form of recognition of the proper training and education of Doctors, Dentists, Pharmacists etc, saw the legislators besieged with demands by those who were properly qualified to enforce some sort of law and order.
Between 1876 and 1879 each of the six Australian States had a licensing system for selling poisons, although in Tasmania, chemists were licensed poison sellers after 1849. Then as had happened in Great Britain, groups of chemists got together to form State Pharmaceutical Societies, in order to ensure that the public would be protected from untrained quacks, to improve the education facilities for Pharmacists to be properly trained and examined, and also to protect their own interests. As mentioned earlier, Tasmania had already required would be pharmacists and doctors to be examined by a court of medical examiners from 1842.
FOUNDATION OF SOCIETIES AND FIRST LEGISLATION
| COLONY | SOCIETY | PHARMACY | POISON |
| ACT | ACT | ||
| NSW | 1876 | 1897 | 1876 |
| QLD | 1880 | 1884 | 1888 |
| SA | 1885 | 1891 | 1862 |
| TAS | 1891 | 1908 | 1867 |
| VIC | 1857 | 1876 | 1876 |
| WA | 1892 | 1894 | 1879 |
Each Act had to recognise those who had been in practice prior to its proclamation and to grant registration if they were in good standing in the community they served.
In those early days there were many problems with reciprocity between the states and disagreements over the relative merits of each state's qualifications led to many legal entanglements.
State differences, apparent at the beginnings pharmacy, thus heightened , engendered an attitude either hostile or apathetic to a national conception and organisation of Pharmacy. This is why we did not have a national Pharmaceutical Society (P.S.A) until the 1970s.
Even though the original State acts were largely modelled on the British Pharmacy Act, there were some fundamental differences. One of the significant ones is that Western Australia is the State where membership of the Pharmaceutical Society is compulsory, and is a requirement for registration. In WA also the Pharmacy Act is administered by the Council of the Society, whereas all the other States have a Pharmacy Board to deal with registration and disciplinary matters, and a Society with a voluntary membership to promote education and the professional development of its members.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia
There are many organisations now with both State and National affiliates, the most significant of course is the Pharmacy Guild of Australia. The Guild is an employer organisation with its own history, and beyond the scope of this paper, but for those interested in further reading. Gregory Haines' book, "Pharmacy in Australia, The National Experience" gives an insight into the politics of pharmacy and the personalities involved.
With legislation to control the practice of pharmacy now an accepted principle, governments around the world are more and more concerned with the public interest rather than that of the professionals, and the fact that we have our Pharmaceutical Societies does extend that protection.
The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia ( P.S.A.)
This organization was formed in February 1977 when the Societies in five of the Australian States agreed to the formation of a federal body to represent the professional interests of Pharmacy. Each of these State Societies retained their autonomy, but accepted direction from the PSA National Council. Because the Council of the Pharmaceutical Society in Western Australia was responsible for the administration of the Pharmacy Act in this State, it was unable to subjugate itself to a form of Federal control. To be truly representative however, the National Council of PSA granted WA observer status. In 1997 an amendment to the PSA rules allowed the WA Society to join PSA as a corporate body so that all WA members automatically became PSA members, and WA then achieved full voting rights on the PSA National Council.
This arrangement has worked well for both PSA and the WA Society, but if the long awaited proposals by the State Government to amend the Western Australian Pharmacy Act to separate the Board and Society functions of the Council become law, then this would bring about further changes to the PSA membership status of WA Pharmacists.
The National Council of PSA is set on a course to achieve a single professional society in Australia, by bringing together all of its State Branches under one umbrella. This sort of arrangement will take many years to bring to fruition, if the political battles of the past are any indication, but where there is goodwill on all sides, some astounding results can be achieved.
One of the difficulties that arises out of having two powerful bodies like the Pharmacy Guild and PSA, is to try and determine where the boundaries lie for each organization. Because the members of the Pharmacy Guild are principally the proprietor pharmacists in each State and Territory, the relationship with the Commonwealth Government is very vital to them to ensure the ongoing viability of community pharmacy. The Government is also vitally concerned with the most cost effective ways to manage the health budget on behalf of the taxpayers of the nation, and the professional role of the pharmacist is always under scrutiny. PSA sees itself as being the appropriate body to deliver the educational tools to enable its members to provide the services the government and the community demand.
On the other hand, the Pharmacy Guild sees itself as also having a role in professional functions and at times this can bring the two organizations into conflict. Again, it is a matter of having goodwill on both sides that will ensure that the economic outcomes will bring the greatest benefits to the citizens of this country and also ensure that there is always a convenient and reliable pharmacy service available to them.
