In this final episode we brought together two children of pharmacy who have each separately dedicated their spare time to researching the history of the profession in Britain and Ireland.

Dr Aidan McMichael grew up in Ballycastle. His PhD is in Applied Plant Science and he also has a diploma in History from Ulster University. He is an accredited and experienced silversmith, local history tour guide and has just started working as a wedding celebrant. His grandmother, grandfather, father and aunt were all community pharmacists. He has curated a collection of documents and artefacts from his family history, a selection of which were displayed in Society House during the height of our celebrations last November. He has also written extensively about the careers and personal histories of his pharmacist ancestors, especially about his grandmother Rose and grandfather James, who met while studying pharmacy in Dublin at the start of the 20th century before moving to James's hometown of Ballycastle in the early 1910s to establish the pharmacy practice that would eventually be taken over by Aidan's father, also James, and Aunt Eileen in the 1940s. Aidan also volunteers with Ballycastle Museum.

Professor Roisin O'Hare is a Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society NI and an accomplished hospital pharmacist and pharmacy educator. She has a doctorate in, and is an honorary professor of pharmacy practice and the NI Lead Clinical Educational Pharmacist. In the past she has written for the British Society for the History of Pharmacy and she prepared an excellent presentation on the history of pharmacy in Britain and Ireland for our official celebration on 18th November 2025. Like Aidan, Roisin grew up as the child of a community pharmacist, her father Tony, who ran a pharmacy in the village of Forkhill near Newry. Her pharmacy accomplishments are too numerous to list, including setting up and leading a team that designed, developed and delivered experiential learning in hospital pharmacy for M-Pharm undergraduates, as well as becoming president of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists and steering them through the COVID pandemic.

Aidan and Roisin got together at our offices in October 2025 to share their personal pharmacy stories with each other, as well as to combine their meticulous research into the history of modern pharmacy.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.