“Outside the Institute there is a Desert”: The Tenuous Trajectories of Medical Research in Interwar Australia

نویسنده

  • PETER GRAEME HOBBINS
چکیده

Throughout the fin de siècle, medical research institutes increasingly hallmarked “modernity” across industrialized nations and their colonies. While the reification of these “veritable laboratory Xanadus” as insular centres for pure science has recently been questioned, the absence of such facilities in Australia prior to the First World War had enduring ramifications for public, political and professional perceptions of scientific medicine. Indeed, the handful of establishments that arose between 1910 and 1939 merit attention precisely because they so patently embodied local projections of “medical research”. Underpinned by a pragmatic progressivism, yet constrained by fealty to empire, the enterprises emerging during this period were predominantly British in flavour and modern in their ideals. In both form and function, however, the early Australian research institutes were never simple facsimiles of international models. Instead, each was shaped by local accommodations in defining its mission and value within a culture often indifferent—and not infrequently hostile—to basic research. Indeed, each of these ventures constituted an experiment, or rather a contingent series of experiments, to triangulate itself within a favourable medical, social and political space. Yet the development of the early Antipodean research institutes resists a teleological reading. Most subsisted with fewer than ten to fifteen staff, and many stagnated or failed outright. In the absence of a stable funding base or a groundswell of investigators

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عنوان ژورنال:

دوره 54  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2010