Dr. Catherine Harkup

She hated nursing, absolutely detested it.

And so a friend suggested to her that she might prefer working in the dispensary, making up all of the pills and the potions that would be prescribed to the recovering soldiers.

She had to study to do this.

You don't just, you know, stick your name on the list and you get the job.

This is a very...

difficult, precise job.

You have to know what you're doing because this is the days before pre-packaged pills and stock solutions and the rest of it.

So she studied very hard.

She studied theoretical chemistry, also the practical side of actually making pills and lotions.

So she had an awful lot of knowledge at her fingertips from this particular era.

Well, they would receive the prescription from a doctor, much like you would take a doctor's prescription to a chemist today, except that it would just list the compounds.

And then you had to take them off the shelf, weigh them out and actually mix them in with other things so that they could be pressed into pills or they could be mixed with oils to make creams or they could be dissolved into solutions to be sold as tonics.

So you had to know not only how much was an appropriate dose to give someone, you had to know what it mixed with so that you can make it into the appropriate formulation.

But you also had to know what you couldn't mix with it.

So certain drugs could not be mixed together, otherwise they would have a chemical reaction.

One of the books that she studied for her exams was called The Art of Dispensing, and it really was an art.

Not only was all this theoretical knowledge that she had to bring to bear, but there was a skill in making these pills so that they didn't crack or they weren't soft.

And mixing cream so that they wouldn't separate.

So it really was an incredible job, a difficult job to do, not just from the safety aspects, but also from the aesthetics of it to make a product that people were willing to swallow.

Because it was just embarrassingly easy to get hold of this stuff.