Pharmacy still at the forefront -- 125 years on

May 2006

The Victorian College of Pharmacy was established in the late 1800s to help regulate the sale of medicines and potions in Victoria . In the 125 years since, it has evolved into a leader in drug development and wound care. Here, staff and former students reflect on the changes.

Report: Diane Squires
Photography: Greg Ford

History in a bottle: (From left) Mr Alistair Lloyd, Professor Colin Chapman and Ms May Admans.

Around the middle of the 19th century, almost anyone could make and sell potions and patent medicines, from hair tonics to liver pills, resulting in many hundreds of poisoning deaths each year.

This led to people who did have pharmaceutical qualifications and experience urging that, as a matter of public safety, they should be given sole responsibility for supplying these substances.

Subsequently in 1881, the Victorian College of Pharmacy was opened, modelled on the London School of Pharmacy that had been established in 1842. The college was the first to teach pharmacy in Australia .

Mr Alistair Lloyd graduated from the Victorian College of Pharmacy (now a faculty of Monash University ) in 1956 and is the current Chair of the college's fundraising foundation. He has watched over the years as the industry, and particularly the college, has placed greater emphasis on research.

"The college has established centres of excellence and undertakes incredible research now," he says. "When I started, most of our time was spent learning how to extract the active principals from vegetable drugs and combining them with chemicals and other substances to make stable medicinal dose forms. Now they look at the way medicines work and develop molecules so that medications will be more effective.

"Also, the labs then smelled of 'rotten egg' gas, which is no longer acceptable -- all those gases must now be used in fume hoods. And today, for example, they use micrograms of drugs, whereas we used teaspoonfuls."

The college was the first non-university institution in Australia to offer a degree. In 1968, Ms May Admans became the first person to graduate from the college with a Bachelor of Pharmacy.

After working in the industry for a couple of years, she returned to the college to teach and has now been with the faculty for 35 years. "I came back to the college to work because I had enjoyed my time there as a student and had a positive feel about its future direction," she says.

"I remember working like a slave as a first-year student because I was scared stiff -- I wasn't in my comfort zone and didn't know how much everyone else knew. I did well though, so I took it a bit freer and easier in second and third years."

The way we were: Winners of the Parke Davis Award (in Pharmacy) in 1953.

Both Ms Admans and Mr Lloyd agree that one of the biggest changes to the industry was the introduction of manufactured drugs just after World War II.

"Prior to the war, most pharmacists kept the ingredients behind the counter, and doctors wrote prescriptions for pharmacists to compound those ingredients into medicines," Mr Lloyd says.

"I started at the college just after the war, and at that time about 80 per cent of all medications were still being made up by the pharmacist, which took up most of our time. Now, probably 99 per cent of drugs come already manufactured.

"The pharmacist's role has gone from being someone who compounds medications to taking responsibility, alongside doctors, for making sure people have the right medications and are given the right advice on how to use those medications."

Dean of the faculty Professor Colin Chapman agrees. He says that while the science is still highly important, students today have to learn triage skills as well.

"There is a greater emphasis now on providing medication advice and acting as a triage -- interacting with customers, assessing what their symptoms are and determining whether they can be treated on the spot or referred on," he says.

"Graduates still need to know how to put medications together and they need good problem-solving skills, but they also need to be able to provide the right health care advice."

When the college became part of Monash in 1992, Professor Chapman says its standing expanded beyond the pharmacy industry.

"The college was always very well known in pharmacy circles, but not much beyond that. On joining Monash, we gained a wider reputation," he says.

Last year, the Victorian College of Pharmacy worked with Monash's Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences to establish pharmacy and medicine courses at Sharjah University in the United Arab Emirates.

In 2008, it will also establish a pharmacy degree at the university's campus in Malaysia.

Professor Chapman says these initiatives help strengthen the international reputation of the faculty and the university.

"We've come a long way in the past 125 years and now, with the curriculum spreading internationally, we have an ideal platform to further strengthen the faculty's reputation in teaching and research around the world."

The Victorian College of Pharmacy has a range of activities planned to celebrate its 125th anniversary. To find out more, go to the Victorian College of Pharmacy website.