Ever since Little Darwin ran the recent post about the Melbourne pharmacist Lois Savage who conducted tours to the Far East in the l930s we have speculated if she ever came in contact with or had heard about the antics of award winning Australian novelist Xavier Herbert.
See Xavier , pictured , painted by Ray Crooke , qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist in Perth when he was 21 and moved to Melbourne in l923 .
Apart from working in the Melbourne Hospital in the VD department , he also opened a chemist shop in Caulfield at his mother's insistence . This upset another nearby chemist , "an old maid ", who spat in his face when he introduce himself , and spied on him .
Business picked up when he performed a "miracle" on a woman suffering deafness and pain in an ear. He discovered there was a plug of old cottonwool in the ear which when removed restored her hearing and ended the pain.
Up on the window of the pharmacy went a sign -MEDICINE AND ADVICE 5/-. Herbert admitted to this writer that at times he indulged in quackery in this early part of his life.
Eventually he was investigated for contravention of the Medical Act. At an inquiry it was revealed the woman in the nearby pharmacy had reported Herbert for charging for advice.
Furthermore, she claimed he performed abortions at night . She based this serious allegation on the considerable number of women she had seen going into his premises.
According to Herbert's account of the episode, the woman also said she had seen him doing something to a naked womn while she spied on him from atop a ladder placed against the wall of a nearby draper's shop !!!! Herbert identified the said naked lady as a blonde girlfriend of "sweet and and ardent nature".
To broaden his medical knowledge, he signed on as a student at the Melbourne University Faculty of Medicine. He also wrote short stories and a series of newspaper articles explaining heredity, hormones and psycho-pathology , investigated a Melbourne quack who promoted a cure all -The Water of Life-said to be an ancient secret of Central Australian tribes.
One of his short stories, North of Capricorn, appeared in the Australian Journal in August 1,1925. Set in the North, it told of pearlers , huge iron ore deposits in Western Australia and mentioned Port Darwin and Cairns , places which would later play a large part in his life.
While he was occasionally able to get part time work with pharmacists , he found they were mainly antagonistic when he told them he was studying to become a doctor . He went on to portray pharmacists as mean , money-grabbing shopkeepers. Herbert was attending medical school when the university was visited by the splitter of the atom, Sir Thomas Rutherford.
The pharmacy shop he opened was sold to a man who spoke of various ways to make money. As it turned out, the building was raided by police and it was discovered that counterfeit money was being made on the premises; the man with the money making ideas subsequently decamped .
No doubt the goings on in the pharmacy during Herbert's time and the next occupant's would have been the subject of much discussion among members of the pharmacy fraternity in Melbourne, Miss Savage possibly ?
During his less than glorious time at university , Herbert said he once arranged a large quantity of free beer for the faculty by posing as a lecturer in chemistry taking his students on regular tours of breweries to study the process of fermentation .
Xavier inquired about the possibility of becoming a ship's pharmacist with the Commonwealth Line.
By a variety of means , by ship and overland , he eventually made his way to Darwin via Sydney and Queensland , meeting all kinds of colourful characters and unusual situations along the way, making observations about the treatment of Aborigines , which inspired his writing .
Certainly colourful was the Chief Medical Officer of the Northern Territory, in Darwin, Dr Henry Leighton Jones.
From a humble background in New South Wales, he became a pharmacist , went to America to study dentistry , where he took up medicine . He also went to the United Kingdom to further his qualifications .
Rejected as unfit for medical service in World War One, he went to Darwin in 1915 . Between 1916 and 1927 he was the only pharmacist , dentist and doctor for most of the time , his practice covering the entire Territory and parts of South Australia .
He had a a specially equipped Clement-Talbot car and was accompanied by a chauffeur- mechanic and a Chinese cook on his outback trips.
Apart from shooting crocodiles and buffaloes , he also had a ketch, the Maskee, which Herbert used in both novels Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country.
He had sailed the Maskee to Singapore to attend the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine where he became friendly with the Sultan of Johor , who later supplied him with monkeys for research .
After leaving Darwin , the doctor taught himself to speak French with the aid of Linguaphone records so he could read the works of Russian Serge Voronoff ,Professor of Surgery and Director of Experimental Surgery at the College de France , Paris.
The doctor went to Paris and worked with Voronoff to get first-hand experience at gland transplant surgery to help cretins , the prematurely senile and the impotent.
Dr Leighton Jones married Voronoff's secretary and they returned to Australia where he carried out transplant surgery in a private hospital at Morriset, NSW
( Pharmacists, Herbert, Melbourne .)
