Byron Lionel Stanton was born in 1891 at Palmerston North, New Zealand, the seventh son of William and Ava Stanton. The family moved to Australia, where BLS attended Scotch College, Melbourne. After leaving school, he studied pharmacy and qualified in 1913, topping the class list.

He started medicine, but shortly after the outbreak of war, joined the Australian Army Medical Corps as a sergeant dispenser, serving on troop-ships and in England. He was sent back to Australia to continue his course at Melbourne University and graduated with honours in 1921. Before he graduated in medicine, he was appointed independent lecturer in materia medica and pharmacy, with a seat on the faculty of medicine, so that in 1919, he was lecturing to students of his own year. He held this post for the next forty-four years, as well as being the representative of the Pharmacy Board on the faculty of medicine.

In 1921-22, he was an RMO at the Melbourne Hospital, moving to the Children's Hospital in 1923-25. Late in 1925, he went to England as a graduate student. He passed the MRCP examination in 1926. The most important contact of that period was with WH Martindale, author of The Extra Pharmacopoeia, who authorised BLS to handle all pharmacopeial queries from the Australasian region. From this meeting came his appointment as BMA representative on the British Pharmacopoeia (Australia) Committee. In 1926 he married Alice Mills and a year later their only child, Claire, was born. She later married Robert Appleby, an Adelaide medical graduate.

In 1927, he became head of the department of materia medica of the Victorian College of Pharmacy, which post he held for the rest of his life. The following ten years were devoted to a busy round of lectures to medical and pharmacy students and to building up a consultant medical practice. Pharmacy students often visited his home for relaxation and music, as also did Hamilton Russell, a valued friend, original thinker and fine pianist.

He was a `green-fingered' gardener, and probably the first to grow Digitalis lanata in Australia. Less strenuous hobbies were sketching and water-colour painting of Australian plants, particularly terrestrial orchids - paintings which are now a valuable record of vanishing treasures. He was also a competent bookbinder and carpenter, and an expert exponent of origami. He was admitted to fellowship of the Pharmaceutical Society in 1930, and about this time was made an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society of New South Wales.

With the outbreak of war in 1939 he became an adviser to the Department of Defence. Part of his home became an 'ops room' for the compilation of the War Emergency Formulary (1941), and later the Australian War Pharmacopoeia (1942), from which grew the post-war 6Australian Pharmaceutical Formulary. The Medical Equipment Control Committee also met there frequently. In 1943, he was admitted FRACP under article 40, an honour he ranked second only to Martindale's confidence in him.

After the War the drug revolution became full-scale. This entailed a huge and continuing amount of work for him. During this time he served on the Poisons Advisory Committee and the Proprietary Medicines Advisory Committee and periodically revised the Australian Pharmaceutical Formulary as well as contributing to the Medical Journal of Australia.

In 1963 he suffered a brief illness which required hospital admission. While in hospital, he finished marking the medical students' examination papers, and, happy in the knowledge that his condition was improving and that he would return home, he died suddenly.