The Swaggie (@Patriotrealm)

I hope you enjoy this nostalgic look back - a prescription from the past. The author lives in FNQ, We learn many things in life, from a range of different people and random events, and the course of our life is often changed in a manner completely unexpected. This being in the days prior to the introduction of computers in pharmacies the daily activities were quite routine … open and deal with cartons of stock left by the carrier, commence to dispense prescriptions as customers brought them in, and assist the two staff members, Joan and Betty (who had previously worked for a local doctor so was no stranger to pharmacy work). The big difference was in the dispensing procedure, as prescriptions were handwritten, so the first challenge was to decipher what often could only be described as an adjectival scrawl. Having spent the apprenticeship years mastering this art I was fortunately ahead of the game being familiar with the individual idiosyncracies of the local doctors … out of town scripts though were another matter, and could be solved by visiting one of the other pharmacies when our combined efforts would generally crack the nut. A question often asked was ‘’how on earth do you read those prescriptions?’’ to which the answer was of course ‘’ generally with great difficulty’’. It is a really interesting article. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. https://patriotrealm.com/index.php/3856-a-prescription-from-the-past-how-thing-used-to-be