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This section of the Bulletin contains a review of recent books of relevance to Indigenous health. Books are reviewed by experts in the field. If you know of a new book of interest to our users, please contact us. If you are pubisher and would like a book reviewed, please supply us with the book and relevant details.

Reading doctors' writing: race, politics and power in Indigenous health research, 1870-1969

Thomas DP (2004)
Reading doctors' writing: race, politics and power in Indigenous health research, 1870-1969.
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press
(xvi + 209pp, RRP $29.95) ISBN 0 85575 458 3

Reviewed by Professor Ernest Hunter
North Queensland Clinical School, University of Queensland

‘I have found little evidence of maltreatment of Indigenous subjects by past researchers, but I have also found little research that greatly helped Indigenous people’ (p. 135). So comments David Thomas, a medical practitioner with considerable experience in the community-controlled sector in the Northern Territory, in the epilogue to his recently published book Reading doctors writing: race, politics and power in Indigenous health research, 1870-1969, which is based on his PhD. He continues, in these concluding remarks, stating:

Thomas was drawn to this work by the reactions of Indigenous colleagues to research and representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – his approach seems to have been crystallised by reading Edward Said: ‘I can still remember the revelatory impact of first reading Said’s books … and their descriptions of the links between colonial texts and colonial power: links that now seem so obvious. I remember immediately beginning to think about the links between colonial medical texts and colonial power in Australia’ (p. 5). Thomas applies the approaches of Said and Foucault to the discourse of medical research to demonstrate that this, as part of the wider discourse about Indigenous Australians, ‘encoded the way the colonisers dominated the colonised and how both parties imagined themselves, each other, and colonialism itself' (p. 6).

This work presents an analysis of articles and letters about Indigenous health and related issues published in the Medical Journal of Australia (and its predecessors from 1870 to 1914) up to 1969, a time of major social changes in Indigenous affairs when the term ‘Aboriginal health’ began to be used in academic writing and following which a major increase in production in this field occurred. Thomas acknowledges the work of Lindsey Harrison, whose 1979 MA thesis provided a starting point for his own work. However, as he notes: ‘She concentrated on questions about “race” and I have added more detailed questions about the representations of Indigenous people, politics and power’ (p. 9).

This is a lively and provocative book that provides an understanding of the contexts in which medical writers and researchers have worked over the last century. Indeed, it is these changing contexts that emerge as perhaps the most important issues – the extent to which the medical profession has reflected dominant views rather than challenged them – even when this has in turn challenged the ‘science’ undertaken. There is now an extensive literature documenting the roles of medical professionals in race science in the United States, Europe and South Africaⁱ. However, the approach taken in this book generates a timeline that includes insights into how representations and constructions of Indigenous Australians have changed over time, locates key developments in Indigenous affairs and in Indigenous health (and their interrelationship), and introduces a range of medical professionals whose work is usually encountered in citation. In this journey we have glimpses also of the innovation of particular figures (such as John Cawte) who, against the grain, sought to define a different relationship to Indigenous people as subjects, patients and colleagues. Predictably and appropriately a key area considered is that of the ethics of research and Thomas reflects that:

Also predictably, there is more focus on literature and letters in the 1950s and 1960s: Thomas gives particular attention to 25 letters published between 1956 and 1969 in the Medical Journal of Australia that were written by Barry Christophers (who he also interviewed), a Melbourne general practitioner. Christophers was centrally involved in the wider political fight for Aboriginal rights and this section lays out the social and political context of that critical period. Christophers’ contributions foregrounded the asymmetry of power in the colonial context and challenged prevailing notions of Indigenous passivity. Through the pages of this book the man behind the letters emerges against a political and social background that was rapidly changing. The reader also has similar glimpses of many others – Tindale, Cleland, Cillento, Duguid … - who, as noted earlier, are probably familiar only in citation.

This book, in the final analysis, is about health research and practice and its complex relationship to the values and politics of society. Thomas believes that effective research must be informed by an understanding of the social, political and historical contexts in which research is undertaken and, consequently demands that researchers reflect not only on this history but be willing to locate themselves therein:

Endnote

ⁱ The work of Elazar Barkan is particularly relevant. Warwick Anderson’s book, The cultivation of whiteness: science, health and racial destiny in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2002)], has extended this to Australia.

Last updated: 30 March, 2005