Book Reviews
Reading doctors' writing: Race, politics and power in indigenous health research 1870-1969
David Piers Thomas
ISBN: 0-85575-458-3 2004 210 pages Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press
Helen Ware
University of New England
Armidale, Australia
This book is about an important topic: how medical experts wrote about Aboriginal health in Australia. The author, who is himself a medical practitioner with experience of working in a range of Aboriginal communities, is well qualified and sympathetic to Aboriginal views. Yet the resulting book, based on the author’s PhD thesis, and concentrating upon health research published in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) from 1914-69, is profoundly frustrating. The root problem is that there was remarkably little medical writing on Aboriginal health in the period covered. For example, there was a grand total of 13 letters to the editor on Indigenous health issues for the entire period 1914-49. As a consequence, even in the 143 pages of book text, there are digressions on the politics of the Rockefeller funded anti-hook worm campaign in Mexico and Foucault’s views on governmentality.
The first medical writer to discuss Aboriginal health was apparently a Dr Andrew Ross from Molong in New South Wales, who wrote a quite sympathetic account of the Aboriginal use of eucalypt-leaf poultices for the treatment of spear wounds. His jottings and motivations are discussed in four separate places in the text. This is symptomatic of an overall failure to tell the story as a clear historical narrative. This serves to obscure the reality that, up until the 1960s, it could still be said that the earlier nineteenth-century medical writers were often more concerned about the well-being of the natives than many of the twentieth-century writers who followed them.
The biggest gap in this book, however, is its failure to discuss the origins of the near universal belief that the natives were a dying race. This is one, sometimes self-serving, ‘medical’ belief that had immense political significance, but its origins are not discussed: even though Gordon Briscoe’s work on Counting, Health and Identity: A History of Aboriginal Demography in Western Australia and Queensland 1900-1940 appears in the bibliography.
The author is faced by the problem that so much of what he has to discuss is racist, unscientific dross of a low quality even by the standards of its own day. This sad and sorry tale has few heroes and certainly no heroines and, reflecting the nature of the materials themselves, the Aborigines who figure are no more than shadowy wraiths identified only by their diseases, or their willingness or otherwise to participate in experiments designed to satisfy white curiosity rather than improve Aboriginal health. One hero is Barry Christophers, a Melbournian general practitioner who wrote half of all letters to the MJA editor on the subject of Aboriginal health published from 1955-64. Christophers campaigned as a member of the activist Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (which was regarded as a Communist Party front by the security agencies) on political issues, such as whether Aborigines were indeed starving in the Warburton Ranges, and the case for equal access to the tuberculosis allowance for Aboriginal patients in Queensland.
In a book centred on the MJA which, remarkably, only had three editors from 1914 to 1977 (Henry Armit 1914-30, Mervyn Archdall 1930-57 and Ronald Winton 1957-77), it is striking that there is no discussion of the views of these three gatekeepers to publication. Nor is it discussed just how the selection of materials to be published by the MJA was made. Christophers claimed that all but one of the letters he ever wrote to the MJA was published: these were indeed calmer times before the advent of publish or perish.
One recurrent but largely unexplored theme is just how political medicine has always been. The majority of the doctors described appear to have been more interested in political point-scoring than preventing or curing disease, but then doctors who write for medical journals presumably are not a representative sample of the profession. Few of these writers were engaged in medical practice as the core of their work, and as researchers, many were as interested in science in general as they were in medicine or Aboriginal health in particular. In the 1920s and 1930s blood-group typing was as much an interest of anthropologists as of medical researchers.
Anyone with an interest in the medical discussion of Aboriginal health should read this book, not least because it will point them to the original writings. However, they should first have read William Anderson’s The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (2002) which provides a lucid and invaluable introduction to the historical context in which the ideas described by David Thomas were able to flourish. Researchers with an interest in particular areas of Indigenous health are well served by Thomas’s comprehensive index. Still, the reader of this text should expect to be left with many more questions than answers, and a desire to meet the author to ask: ‘But just why did your predecessors get it all so very wrong?’
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