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Past histories charting interactions between British healthcare and Aboriginal Australians have tended to be dominated by broad histological themes such as invasion and colonization. While such descriptions have been vital to modernization and truth telling in Australian historical discourse, this paper investigates the nineteenth century through the modern cultural lens of mental health. We reviewed primary documents, including colonial diaries, church sermons, newspaper articles, medical and burial records, letters, government documents, conference speeches and anthropological journals. Findings revealed six overlapping fields which applied British ideas about mental health to Aboriginal Australians during the nineteenth century. They included military invasion, religion, law, psychological systems, lunatic asylums, and anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective:: This paper reviews the history of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) with an emphasis on the Australian context over the past 30 years. The review includes data collection, the contribution of the RANZCP, and changes in legislation.Conclusion:: ECT remains the most effective treatment for severe depression. Since the 1950s efforts have been made to make it more effective, tolerable and acceptable. Over the same period, significant social and political forces have acted to have the practice of ECT restricted or banned. Psychiatrists, through the RANZCP and other bodies, have the responsibility to promote quality ECT practice, advocate for patients, carers, and clinicians, counter inaccurate negative portrayals, and lobby for balanced legislation for ECT and other neurostimulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In twentieth-century Australian criminal law a distinctive departure from the M’Naghten Rules developed as a critique of the discourse of reasoning and verdicts applying in the relevant English trials from the 1880s. The English verdict of ‘guilty but insane’ was criticized by the leading jurists as contradictory. In a sequence of influential judgments, the jurist Owen Dixon articulated an approach to the insanity defence that made room for a medico-legal discourse which broadened the possible referents of what it meant to ‘know’ the legality of an act, and also acknowledged the complex behavioural factors that might determine an act of homicide. This paper explores the shaping and significance of this departure and its comparative judicial, medical and social contexts. A concluding discussion considers whether the more flexible interpretation of the insanity defence implied by the direction of Dixon’s decisions made as much of a difference to frequency of use of the defence as the contemporaneous decline and eventual abolition of capital punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to link the history of the Multicentre Australian Study of Epidural Anaesthesia in high risk surgery, the MASTER Trial, the first National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funded multicentre randomised clinical trial in Australia led by anaesthetist researchers, and the decision of The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) to establish a clinical trials network, in 2003, to the success of contemporary researchers in Australia and New Zealand in anaesthesia and perioperative medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst Australian anaesthetists there have been many whose ingenuity and mechanical knowledge produced ingenious devices. Lidwill and Geoffrey Kaye come immediately to mind, and their contributions are well-described elsewhere. In this paper, two inventions with contrasting fates are described: the Grant Humidifier and the Komesaroff single-use analgesia device. Graham Grant's invention addressed the problem of rain-out in a most ingenious manner The device was compact, efficient and deserved greater commercial success, but a similar apparatus developed in New Zealand was better supported and captured most of the market. Grant has a degree in engineering, acquired before his medical degree, but David Komesaroff spent only a year in the Engineering Faculty before transferring to Medicine. Nevertheless, he has remained interested and in touch with technical matters, and has a number of other devices to his credit. Mention is briefly made of others: Stokes (of the suction bullet), Bill Cole (an early volatile specific vaporiser), Fisk (the paediatric ventilator) and Noel Cass (the Cass needle) These achievements are by no means the end of the road. Already an Australian-designed single-use laryngoscope is being manufactured and launched on both the national and international markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This paper is an examination of an early Australian settler’s states of mind in episodes of psychosis and some issues from her life which may have contributed to the psychoses. Method: Hospital records of her psychoses and her diary entries in the months surrounding the onset of illness were investigated from a psychoanalytic perspective, and inferences about her underlying personality are drawn from a recent publication about her diaries. Results: An historical interpretation of her life and states of mind based on the documents is presented. Conclusions: Failure to resolve psychic conflict led to restrictions in how she and her family lived, and left her susceptible to decompensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]