The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7210 p198-199
10 August 2002

Society summary

Death of Society’s last life member

The last remaining life member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has died at the age of 95.

Mrs Isabella Keiller, who died on 29 June, became a life member on 4 December 1933, after initially joining the Society in 1928. She was one of the last pharmacists to take up life membership of what was then still a voluntary society. The Society stopped offering life membership on 1 January 1934, when the Pharmacy and Poisons Act 1933 came into force and required all pharmacists to be members and to pay an annual retention fee.

According to the registrar’s report for 1933, Mrs Keiller was one of 974 “life compounders” out of a total membership of 16,003 at the end of that year.

Mrs Keiller’s life membership was a gift from her pharmacist father, James Smail, at a cost to him of 25 guineas (£26.25). Mr Smail ran a pharmacy in Perth, Scotland, where Mrs Keiller spent most of her working life after early locum experience in Fife, Dundee and Dunfermline. She continued to live in Perth after her retirement, spending her last few years in a nursing home there.

At the beginning of this year Mrs Keiller was one of two surviving life members of the Society. The other, Reg Davis, died at his home in Polperro, Cornwall, on 8 March, just eight days after celebrating his 100th birthday (PJ, 23 February, p237). Mr Davis had joined the Society in 1928 and taken up life membership in 1930.

Deaths, p200