Pills and Potions: A Pharmacist's Life

When the Border Control official at London's Heathrow airport asked Rod Hunt-Sharp what he did for a living he replied, 'I deal in drugs.' Which was true, but not in the way the official took it to mean. And not the wisest of replies in such circumstances.

Ruffled feathers were eventually soothed and Rod was sent on his way to begin a new life and a new career far from where he started out as the son of the local policeman in a remote Queensland community.

He survived bullying and prejudice at school and university, and been rejected for national service on worrying medical grounds. Now he faced the challenge of being an unworldly young Australian plunged into the Britain of the 'Swinging Sixties'.

For the next fifty years or so he did as he had told the immigration official he would do - he dealt in drugs. But these were the preventative and curative medicines prescribed by hospitals and family doctors.

Rod was a pharmacist. A skilled member of a highly specialised world that few understand but on which everyone depends. After working behind the scenes in major UK hospitals he returned to Australia - with an English wife - to risk all by setting up his own pharmacies and rising to the heights of his profession.

The challenges and setbacks he faced were many and varied. He was always aware of the community's unwavering trust in pharmacies and the services and medicines they provide. Mistakes are rare, continual checking is essential. Even errors in a GP's prescription are the responsibility of the pharmacist.

Pills and Potions delves into life behind the dispensary of an average suburban pharmacy to a backdrop of an entertaining account of a young Australian's encounter with the British way of life.

It explains the puzzling terminology and the role of Latin, unravels the ingredients of well-known concoctions and their uses, delves into pharmacy's long history and looks at what goes on in the restricted world few of us are allowed to enter.