MJA Centenary — History of Australian Medicine

 The main medicopolitical struggle was with the mutualaid friendly societies, which funded basic medical care for a signifi cant proportion of the population until well into the 20th century. The organised profession set out to overcome the power of the lay-controlled societies in imposing an unacceptable contract system on doctors, even if, historically, the guaranteed income was a sine qua non of practice in poorer areas. In this supplement, all the articles except this one focus on the period from about 1900, when modern scientifi c medicine came into its own in Australia. Here, I provide an overview of medicine in colonial Australia, as well as background to the post-1900 articles. For reasons of space, I confi ne my account of the period after about 1850 to the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, where the new university medical schools were located. I do not cover psychiatry because in the period under consideration it was almost exclusively practised in the asylum system and was not an integral part of mainstream medicine; its colonial history is discussed elsewhere.1-3 Nor do I discuss public health in detail, as the focus of this supplement is clinical medicine, but its history is extensively covered in other publications.4,5