Mr Fraser (77) was reflecting on 60 years in pharmacy after retiring as a teaching fellow at the University of Otago school of pharmacy. He continues to work part-time at Dunedin City Pharmacy.
From the late 1950s until 1966, Mr Fraser served his apprenticeship in Oamaru, where he regularly gave a patient arsenic tonic.
"I can only think of one that did that [regularly] ... I think he was in danger of being slowly poisoned.
"He had great faith in this tonic. He thought it was great.
"It was a very low dose of all of those highly dangerous substances, but it was there all the same.
"We did sort of question how it could be [beneficial] but thought it might have been like a homeopathy remedy where you take something that causes the condition in very low dose."
Another prescription the young pharmacist handled was "ADT". Short for "any damned thing", it was an irritated doctor’s way of giving a placebo to patients considered hypochondriacs.
In those days many medicines were made up in a pharmacy, and Mr Fraser said his early career coincided with the end of early pharmacy.
Working in America and Britain in the 1960s, he noted the latter was more inclined towards making up medicines rather than buying them in ready to dispense.
In London he was a senior pharmacist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital for three years until 1969.
He remembers thalidomide being quietly taken off shelves in the early 1960s when its devastating effects were becoming apparent to the medical profession, but before the public furore.
"Thalidomide started a new wave of scrutiny of medicines."
He dispensed the drug "lots of times" to pregnant mothers for morning sickness, not knowing it caused severe birth defects.
"I don’t feel bad because we didn’t know any better," Mr Fraser said.
Over the years pharmacy has changed from largely manual work to managing the patient, and making sure their medicines were correctly appropriate for them.
He is pleased with the general direction of the profession, but said pharmacy was the "meat in the sandwich" of the health sector.
"Some other countries respect their pharmacists more.
"The funding authorities are treating pharmacy harshly."
Because of the changes, he felt his experience was less relevant to students, although they did still learn the basic skills of pharmacy.
Much of Mr Fraser’s New Zealand career was spent in Riverton and Tuatapere. He owned the Tuatapere pharmacy for 22 years. It catered for just 550 people, and when it became unviable, he bought Riverton’s pharmacy, which he owned until 2008, maintaining a depot in Tuatapere.
