History - Corpus

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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Dressing well for going troppo

29 May 2017 Leave a Comment

Julia Wells

[British Central Africa] is a country where Europeans can live healthily by the careful practice of the rules of sanitation and hygiene.” – John Murray, Guide to Health in Africa (London: The African World, 1912).

How to Live in Tropical Africa p. 223 — from ‘How to Live in Tropical Africa’, p. 223

Tropical medicine of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is remembered today primarily for its ground-breaking medical discoveries. The identification of the malaria parasite and its mosquito vector, the development of commercially synthesised and mass-produced prophylactic quinine, and advances in the treatment of sleeping sickness, for example, all helped to define tropical medicine as the epitome of modern medical science. [Read more…] about Dressing well for going troppo

Fertility matters

29 May 2017 1 Comment

Alyssa Kennedy and Barbara Brookes

Alyssa Kennedy, studying Medical History, has been examining the late nineteenth century casebooks of the Dunedin hospital held at Archives New Zealand (Dunedin Branch). She chose to examine uterine complaints. Her findings remind us of the different reproductive experience of women in the past.

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The Golden Age of Islamic Medicine

24 April 2017 2 Comments

Terence Doyle

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 the armies of Islam swept out of the Arabian Peninsula. Within fifty years they had overrun all the territory conquered by Alexander the Great nine hundred years before. Within one hundred years their empire extended from Spain to India and from Egypt to the Caspian Sea in the north. The Caliphs then set about consolidating their empire, building a new capital of Baghdad in 762. This was strategically located on the fertile plain of the river Tigris, away from the reach of marauding armies, yet on the lucrative trading route of the Silk Road to China. The centre piece of the new capital was The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), a combination of publishing house, library and research institute. This became the focus of a vigorous expansion of knowledge in all of the sciences including medicine.