Medical practice in New Zealand 1769-1860

2010

This thesis examines health care in colonial New Zealand and sets about identifying and recognising the care which was given by women in their homes and communities. Based around four dominant etiological theories of the nineteenth century it explores the introduction, application and adaptation of medical knowledge in New Zealand. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Judith Macdonald for her support, guidance and good humour and the Anthropology Department, especially Dr. Michael Goldsmith, for welcoming me into the faculty. Thanks to Janice Smith for her absolute dependability and ready smile and to all the staff at Waikato University who have assisted and supported me up till now. I would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Waikato and The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for their financial support and recognition. Many thanks to my friends and family for listening to me and maintaining complete faith in my abilities. Special thanks to Stan for his invaluable editing skills and to Lindsey and Shelley for the constant support and insightful conversation. Thank you Marcus for the frequent reality checks and motivation. iv

This article draws on both published and unpublished private family writing to examine how European settler colonial families in southeastern Australia and New Zealand negotiated worlds of sickness and health between 1850 and 1910. It argues that personal writing is a neglected yet rich repository for shedding light on colonial cultures of health across families and households in colonial Australia and New Zealand. In examining challenges to well-being and gendered lay health care practices inside domestic spaces, we glimpse more than worlds of health and treatment. Through their management of health and illness in private domestic spaces, the sense of well-being colonial families created for their members tells us something both about their emotional lives and cultures of colonialism.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2001

The New Zealand journal of history, 1988

WOMEN entered New Zealand medicine with little fuss and few impediments. Eliza Frikart's registration in 1893 went unnoticed and has since been all but forgotten. Frikart's brief New Zealand career as an advertising doctor peddling abortefacients did little to hinder the path of the better known figures of Margaret Cruikshank and Emily Siedeberg who followed her later in the decade. Yet, having penetrated the profession and soon comprising around 10% of new registrations, women remained at this level until well after the introduction of social security, their numbers rising only temporarily as a result of the Great War. By 1941 women made up 8.6% of all those doctors registered since 1867 but despite their late start were still only 10.3% of that year's registrations.' Women were also far less successful in achieving the high incomes medicine offered their male colleagues. 2 With a few exceptions, the comparatively large number of women in the Health Department remained at its lower levels. In a profession where full-time private practice with an honorary hospital appointment was the confirmation of professional accomplishment, women were more likely to be salaried and part-time. While a few gained positions as visiting consultants these were usually in less fashionable specialities. Surgery, which offered the highest incomes, remained a gentlemen's club. Still, in medicine, compared with other high status, high income professions, women were well represented. 3 In 1936 there were 83 women doctors, two women school inspectors, fourteen dentists, four architects and no university professors. 4 Why were the barriers preventing women from entering the medical profession so much more easily overcome than were the more subtle obstructions which frustrated women from competing in the medical economy on an equal footing with their male colleagues? While the New Zealand situation was similar to that of other societies, the relatively small size of the New Zealand profession allows a view of the experience of all women doctors rather than just of those whose strength of character, determination and good fortune allowed them to become successful medical practitioners. 5 Women became doctors, as they became teachers, because medicine, like education, was compatible with current stereotypes of women's role in society. The terms 'lady doctor' and 'medical man' were more than simple labels: they carried with them much of the sexual ideology of Victorian respectability. 'Medical man' was commonly used to denote the medical practitioner as entrepreneur. Whenever the profession as a whole described doctors as actively engaged in the medical economy-developing practices, or pursuing their careers-it tended to make the doctor masculine. 'Lady doctor', on the other hand, had very different connotations. The term implied that women doctors remained 'ladies', and as such continued to fulfil social roles consistent with late nineteenth-century norms of behaviour acceptable for middle-class women. Many values attributed to this feminine mystique were also part of the developing professional ethos. Doctors, too, were advancing themselves as compassionate, serving healers, more concerned with preventing suffering than amassing fortunes. In return for being accepted, even in a limited role, women lent medicine the virtues of their sex. Doris Gordon's professional and political role was, for instance, that of a pragmatic defender of the private practice economy in midwifery, but she was able to present herself as no more than a dedicated woman 'fired with a compelling ambition to serve as a medical missionary, a decision which later circumstances altered to service for country mothers'. 6 Nonetheless, precisely because feminine virtues contrasted with the masculine economic and scientific characteristics of the 'medical man', women doctors, once over the considerable hurdle of getting a medical education, then faced even more challenging obstacles to professional equality within the medical marketplace. New Zealand women were saved the political battles over entry into medical schools and the right to registration and academic qualifications

2003

Health Department folklore since the 1950s has attributed the rise of health education in New Zealand almost entirely to the efforts of one man, 'Radio Doctor' Harold Turbott. The historical evidence reveals, however, a more extensive commitment by the Health Department, dating back to its foundation in 1900. This paper examines the evolution of health education in New Zealand and concludes that Turbott's role in its development has been overstated, largely at his own instigation.