History - Corpus

Blue devils

2 October 2017 1 Comment

Alannah Tompkins

Mental health problems among medical practitioners are a touchy subject. There has been research on anxiety, depression, and burnout in different occupations, and medicine has come in for its share of attention, but it is a difficult topic to address in the present given twenty-first century aspirations to seemingly infallible practice. It is reassuring, I hope, to learn that we can also study the phenomenon in the past and realise that infallibility or perfection is a myth in medical practice; current practitioners might take comfort from predecessors who were human first, and qualified doctors second.

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Out of the box: memoir of a trainee nurse, Dunedin Hospital 1884

2 October 2017 Leave a Comment

M. H. Fraser

Rachael Francis, Historian in Residence at the Pioneer Women’s Hall, Dunedin, and a box of treasure.

Dunedin’s Pioneer Women’s Hall, set up in 1942 in a former lawyer’s office in Moray Place, was the end result of a project initiated by Dr Emily Siedeberg, New Zealand’s first woman doctor. Envisaged as both a monument to the city’s foremothers and a centre for women’s activities, it remains in use by various community groups today. Recently, historian-in-residence Rachael Francis has been delving into the boxes of memorabilia stored in the hall. One of her finds is this memoir by M. H. Fraser, one of the first nurse trainees at Dunedin Hospital in 1884. Fifty years later, in 1934, Nurse Fraser wrote the following memoir about her experiences.

Nurse training [in 1884], by M. H. Fraser

Towards the end of 1884, the trustees of Dunedin Hospital realised that their nursing needs could no longer be met by stray trained nurses visiting the town and by untrained people. The men patients were nursed by untrained men, the women and children depended mostly on the visitors, some of whom had come in search of healthcare for themselves. In our home, a friend was being nursed after a major operation … and the nurse in charge was visited by a trained nurse, who was temporarily employed in the hospital. She brought news of the Trust’s decision [to train nurses] and turning to me said, “You are the type. Why not apply?”

This appealed to me at once and it was decided that I should write to the secretary, Mr Burns … A week later saw me in harness.

A short history of the smile

25 September 2017 3 Comments

Barbara Brookes

A smile is a curve that sets everything straight” – Phyllis Diller.

But it’s not easy to produce a smile on demand. A smile is a response to something, and therefore hard to manufacture. Yet whenever we are faced with a camera these days, we are expected to smile. It’s great if the camera catches us in a moment of pure spontaneous mirth, but rather excruciating if we have to wait for photographer to compose the shot, our smiles tightening into a kind of rictus. Yet in the current selfie culture, smiling for the camera is almost obligatory.

This wasn’t always the case. Mark Twain apparently once said, “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity, than a silly smile caught and fixed forever.” Perhaps that’s why we still don’t smile for passport photographs. If Facebook is any guide, however, the silly smile is how millions of people will now be remembered.

Doctor on the ice: Louis Hauiti Potaka in the Antarctic

14 August 2017 2 Comments

Barbara Brookes

Accompanying Admiral William Byrd’s second expedition to the Antarctic in 1934, Dr Guy Shirey reached the Bay of Whales and decided that he could not go on. Faced with this news, Byrd immediately sent out a flurry of telegrams seeking a replacement. He contacted his agent in Wellington and was told that few doctors were willing to come forward. Those who had expressed interest wanted higher salaries. There was, however, one applicant from Nelson. The telegram continued:

THOROUGHLY CAPABLE MAN HIGHLY RECOMMENDED STOP BUT HE IS ONE THIRD MAORI IN BLOOD WOULD THIS DISQUALIFY HIS FEE ALSO 350 POUNDS.

“Them rags that wells my legs”: Sister Kenny’s first polio case

31 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) is famous for inventing and teaching ‘the Kenny Method’ for polio treatment. Her method advocated the application of hot packs during the acute phase of the illness, followed in the convalescent phase by passive movements and active muscle rehabilitation. The Kenny Method contradicted orthodox medical thinking of the time, which was to splint and immobilise the patient, sometimes for many months. Kenny’s approach was used with reported success in Australian clinics during the 1930s, and despite ongoing controversy and opposition from some medical quarters, was eventually adopted in the USA from 1940.

In her autobiography, And They Shall Walk, Sister Kenny tells the story of her first encounter with polio, and how she stumbled on the idea of using moist heat for relief of pain and spasm. Aged 23, and working as a ‘bush nurse’, she was called to a remote outback cottage, where six months previously she had helped with a birth. According to Kenny’s account, this is what happened:

“During my brief stay at the cottage six months before I had grown to love the little two-year-old sister of the new baby boy, and as I rode into the yard I expected to see her come running out to meet me. But all was quiet. The setting sun shed its soft light on the autumn flowers that surrounded even the least pretentious of Australian homes – great masses of bronze and white and pink chrysanthemums and dahlias. But the silence disturbed me. The shy youngsters usually swarm out to greet the bush nurse, and I was full of fears when the frantic mother, only a year older than I, opened the door to me.

Housing and health

19 June 2017 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

Housing is often in the news as a cause of ill-health. Cold, damp and overcrowded houses lead to illness, and various initiatives from Housing New Zealand, in partnership with the District Health Boards, aim to promote Healthy Housing.

We are now told that heating bedrooms overnight to at least 16 degrees will protect us from raised blood pressure and increased risk of heart attack and stroke. This finding may delight power companies but it increases budgetary stress on poor families where expenditure on heating may seem a luxury.

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