MJA Centenary — History of Australian Medicine Medicine in colonial Australia, 1788–1900 Milton J Lewis n this supplement, all the articles except this one focus Summary BA(Hons), MA, PhD Honorary Senior Research on the period from about 1900, when modern scientifi c For the fi rst fi ve decades of European settlement in Fellow I medicine came into its own in Australia. Here, I provide Australia, medical care for convicts and free settlers was an overview of medicine in colonial Australia, as well as provided by the Colonial Medical Service. After about Menzies Centre for Health 1850, as population and wealth grew markedly, there Policy, University of Sydney, background to the post-1900 articles. For reasons of space, Sydney, NSW. was signifi cant professional development based on I confi ne my account of the period after about 1850 to the private practice. milton.lewis@ colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, sydney.edu.au Except in Victoria, medical societies and journals did not where the new university medical schools were located. I do become solidly established until late in the 19th century. not cover psychiatry because in the period under considera- The advent of local British Medical Association branches doi: 10.5694/mja14.00153 tion it was almost exclusively practised in the asylum system was an important factor in this consolidation. and was not an integral part of mainstream medicine; its In the fi rst few years of the colony, mortality was very colonial history is discussed elsewhere.11-3-3 Nor do I discuss high, but the common childhood infections were absent public health in detail, as the focus of this supplement is until the 1830s. From the 1880s, there was a sustained clinical medicine, but its history is extensively covered in decline in mortality from communicable diseases, 44,5,5 and therefore in aggregate mortality, while maternal other publications. mortality remained high. Australian practitioners quickly took up advances Medical care and services in practice from overseas, such as antisepsis and diphtheria antitoxin. They shared in the international In the early colonial period, because of the penal character of growth in the status of medicine, which was conferred the original colonies, the Crown supplied almost all medical by the achievements of bacteriology in particular. care through the salaried Colonial Medical Service (CMS). From 1813, students were apprenticed in Sydney and Colonial governors also pursued public health measures, Hobart and then travelled to Britain to obtain corporate applying quarantine to ships carrying infections and pro- qualifi cations. Medical schools were ultimately opened 4 in the new universities in Melbourne (in 1862), Sydney viding vaccination against smallpox. (1883) and Adelaide (1885). The fi rst female student For 50 years after European settlement in 1788, free set- was admitted to medicine in Sydney in 1885. tlers, as well as convicts, benefi ted from the care of the CMS Medical politics were intense. The outlawing of surgeons. Even South Australia, settled without convicts in practice by unorthodox practitioners proved to be an 1836, had a Colonial Surgeon from the outset.6 Although unattainable goal. In the latter half of the 19th century, CMS surgeons had rights of private practice, William Bland doctors saw chemists as unfair competitors for patients. (1789–1868), a Sydney emancipist doctor, became the fi rst The main medicopolitical struggle was with the mutual- full-time private practitioner in 1815. In 1832, Bland was aid friendly societies, which funded basic medical care the fi rst Australian surgeon to ligate the innominate artery for a signifi cant proportion of the population until well into the 20th century. The organised profession set out to treat an aneurysm; his report of the procedure was only to overcome the power of the lay-controlled societies in 7 the seventh in the world. imposing an unacceptable contract system on doctors, Given the very small free population and private econ- even if, historically, the guaranteed income was a sine omy, and the presence of the CMS, private practice devel- qua non of practice in poorer areas. oped slowly until about the mid 19th century. In NSW, the number of registered medical practitioners leapt from 284 in 1850 to 691 in 1892.8 In Victoria in 1862 (after the consultant surgeons and physicians, specialists in such discovery of gold in the 1850s produced a dramatic increase fi elds as pathology, obstetrics and gynaecology, dermato- in population), there were 335; in 1881 there were 454.6 logy and ophthalmology emerged.66,10,10 Outside the larger urban centres, the scattered popula- tion, great distances and frontier conditions demanded omnicompetent general practitioners. These were initially Professional development naval and military surgeons, along with medically qualifi ed ex-convicts like William Redfern, a full-time practitioner Under the early colonial economic and social conditions, from 1820. Their successors, predominantly British-trained the traditional English division of the profession into but later also graduates of the three local universities, not status groups of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries only practised medicine but had considerable involvement (recog nised from 1815 in England as general practitioners) in political life, commerce, pastoral pursuits and cultural could simply not be transplanted. Indeed, the fi rst relevant developments. The division of labour (identifi ed by pioneer colonial legislation, An Act to defi ne the qualifi cations of economist Adam Smith as the organisational key to greater Medical Witnesses at Coroner’s Inquests and Inquiries held manufacturing productivity) was one of the dominant no- before Justices of the Peace in the Colony of New South Wales, tions of the 19th century. In medicine, the focus of the new 1838, created a single register for doctors and bachelors of division of labour — the specialties — was variously on medicine, physicians and surgeons licensed by a medical body parts, particular diseases, life events or age groups.9 college in Great Britain or Ireland, London apothecaries, By the 1880s, more immigrants with specialist qualifi cations and medical offi cers of the navy and army. This necessary were arriving in the colonies; and in the cities, along with unifi cation predated British experience by a generation.8 MJA 201 (1) · 7 July 2014 S5 Supplement The Medical Witnesses Qualifi cations Act left it to the Wales in 1869) and abetted by malnutrition and scurvy. public to choose between registered regulars (orthodox Annual aggregate mortality rates ranged from 47 to 152 practitioners) and unregistered irregulars (unorthodox prac- per 1000 population, while child deaths fl uctuated between titioners and others who had not completed their orthodox 170 and 490 per 1000.4 training). However, the unity of the regulars as expressed In the 1820s and 1830s, dysentery was the most prevalent in the Act was not matched in practice, so colonial doctors disease, but rheumatism, venereal disease (VD), “dropsy” were eager to establish external symbols of solidarity, as well (oedema), ophthalmia and erysipelas were also common. as to defend themselves against the considerable competi- From the mid 1830s, with the growing infl ux of young, free tion from irregulars. In 1844, William Bland and colleagues families and a high local birth rate, the pool of susceptibles, formed the Medico-Chirurgical Association of Australia, especially in urban centres, became suffi cient to sustain the the objectives of which included maintaining the dignity common infections of childhood, such as whooping cough and privileges of the medical and surgical professions, and and measles. Recurrent local infl uenza epidemics were procuring legislation to outlaw unlicensed practice.8 Despite connected to pandemics and regional epidemics. Marked repeated attempts, the latter proved impossible to achieve in urban growth (without adequate sanitary measures) gave NSW, as in the other colonies (except, partially, in Tasmania, rise to fearsome outbreaks of enteric infections, includ- where unlicensed practice of surgery was banned1111), be- ing diarrhoeal disease, the cause of many infant deaths. cause too many people including politicians saw regulars With the irregular cycles of childhood infections, these colonial doctors as no more effective than irregulars, and the hegemonic outbreaks produced short-term fl uctuations in mortality liberal ideology abhorred monopolies of any sort. were eager until about the 1880s, when a sustained downward trend In 1846, the Australian Medical Journal was established to establish in mortality from communicable diseases is observable. in Sydney. Isaac Aaron, a dedicated public health reformer, external The decline in tuberculosis mortality, a major contributor was its editor until late 1847, when lack of support killed symbols of to the death rate, was part of this secular trend. It was the journal, as it did the medico-chirurgical association. solidarity the decline in deaths from communicable diseases that Development of professional associations and journals dominated the sustained fall in aggregate mortality in the was to become successful late in the century as the mate- late 19th and earlier 20th centuries — the fi rst phase of rial forces of greater urbanisation, population and wealth the modern health transition that raised life expectancy to came to underpin an increasing demand for medical care, unprecedented