‘Where There is No Doctor’: Self-Help and Pre-Hospital Care in Colonial Australia
The history of Australian medicine includes a period of 150 years when many sick and injured colonists relied on self-medication, home treatment, and self-administered healthcare. Many immigrants to Australia read domestic medical guides and,...
| Veröffentlicht in: | Health and History. - Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, 1998. - 14(2012), 2, Seite 162-180 |
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| Format: | Online-Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2012
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| Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk: | Health and History |
| Schlagworte: | First-aid self-help pre-hospital care Colonial Australia Applied sciences Economics Social sciences Health sciences Biological sciences Behavioral sciences mehr... |
| Zusammenfassung: | The history of Australian medicine includes a period of 150 years when many sick and injured colonists relied on self-medication, home treatment, and self-administered healthcare. Many immigrants to Australia read domestic medical guides and, after the 1880s, first-aid texts. This paper documents the chronology of such ‘medical’ self-help and pre-hospital care, and places the theme of published medical and first-aid texts in the perspective of evolving medical practice. Domestic medical books were written by both doctors and lay citizens. The style of the former tended to be doctrinaire and promoted an ethic of "first, do no harm’. By contrast, non-medical authors tended to write in a style encouraging the empowerment of colonists in the self-management of trauma and illness. |
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| ISSN: | 14421771 |
| DOI: | 10.5401/healthhist.14.2.0162 |