Janet McCalman

Journeyings : the biography of a middle-class generation, 1920-1990

Journeyings begins with a tram journeyandmdash;the sixty-nine tram collecting boys and girls from Melbournes middle-class heartland on their first day of school for 1934. It marks the beginning of an extraordinary journey through Australian private life that commences with the gold rushes of the 1850s and concludes in our own time, tracing the life journeyings of a generation of boys and girls from four of Melbournes legendary private schools. In an engrossing and highly original exploration of one of the most neglected subjects in Australian social historyandmdash;the middle classandmdash;Janet McCalman has produced a worthy successor to her acclaimed portrait of working-class life, Struggletown.

A mandatory intercalated degree programme: revitalising and enhancing academic and evidence-based medicine.

Background: Recruitment of medical graduates to research careers is declining. Expansion of medical knowledge necessitates all graduates be equipped to critically evaluate new information. To address these challenges, a mandatory intercalated degree programme was introduced as part of curriculum reform. Aims: To review the place on intercalated degrees, the methods available for learning about research and to analyse experience with a new university programme focusing on research. Methods: A literature review followed by the analysis of experience with eight cohorts of students who had completed the new programme. Results: A total of 1599 students completed the programme. Laboratory-based research was the most common choice followed by clinical research, population health, epidemiology, medical humanities and mental health. Also, 93% of students spent over 75% of their time undertaking research. Sixty-three students published their research, half as first authors. Students and coordinators support the programme. Learning about research during the postgraduate phase is variable and frequently left to individual choice. Conclusion: Intercalating an additional degree focusing on research can achieve a number of learning objectives but demands a level of maturity, autonomy and preparedness, not uniformly present in students undertaking a mandatory intercalated programme. A more realistic goal is the development of ‘research-mindedness’ amongst all students.

A health transition: birth weights, households and survival in an Australian working-class population sample born 1857-1900

There is increasing interest in life course epidemiology. In this article we investigated the relationship between characteristics at birth and survival and year of birth and survival. We have detailed information about birth characteristics and cause of death for 8584 subjects from a cohort of 16,272 registered live births to European Australians in a charity hospital in Melbourne between 1857 and 1900. Women giving birth at the hospital were among the poorest in Melbourne, with almost half unmarried. The adult death certificates of the subjects were traced until 1985. We found that infant mortality was substantially higher in babies who were illegitimate, firstborn, had younger mothers, a birth weight <6lb or were a preterm birth. These factors had a weaker association with child mortality and were not associated with adult survival time. Infant mortality was substantially lower in the cohort born 1891-1900 (36%) than previously (58%), a major improvement not seen for child mortality or adult lifespan. Likely reasons for this improvement are the introduction of antisepsis in maternity wards, enforced registration and police supervision of persons other than their mother who cared for babies, strictly monitored feeding practices and a mandatory autopsy and coronial enquiry for such babies who died. We conclude that this is an early example of a successful public health intervention.

Sex and suffering : women's health and a women's hospital : the Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne 1856-1996

Sex and Suffering is a ground-breaking work. It tells the often shocking story of womens desperation to gain control over their lives and their health, and of medicines struggle to comprehend and manage the mysteries of nature. It offers a graphic and revealing history of childbirth in Australia; of the medical care of women; of nursing and gender roles; and of the impact of immigration on Australian society. Remarkably, thousands of detailed case notes, from the 1850s to the 1930s, survived intact at the Royal Womens Hospital, Melbourne. For the first time in the English-speaking world a historian was allowed to work directly from these confidential patient records. Janet McCalman vividly recreates the lives of patients and the daily work of a hospital. She enables readers to follow the institution through times of growth and economic depression, through the grim history of criminal abortion, and through the inspiring story of medical science and surgery since the coming of anaesthesia. Sex and Suffering is a vivid and absorbing social history of womens health, seen through the work of Australias oldest womens hospital.

Research note: The founders and survivors project

This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility.

Colonialism and the health transition: Aboriginal Australians and poor whites compared, Victoria, 1850–1985

This paper presents the results of the first two longitudinal historical cradle-to-grave datasets constructed in Australia: the Aboriginal population of the state of Victoria, reconstituted backwards using genealogical research and vital registrations, 1835–1930; and an impoverished European population born at the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857–1900 and traced until 1985. It investigates the hypothesis that the health transition in indigenous people was different from that of the dominant non-indigenous population. Both of these studied sub-populations were highly stressed, resulting in high infant mortality and persistent tuberculosis mortality. The Aboriginal population suffered the additional burdens of racism and social exclusion, even though after the passage of the 1886 ‘Half-Castes Act’, the majority of Aboriginal Victorians were legally ‘white’. The impact of that legislation and the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal Victorians from federal entitlements in the twentieth century sent the Aboriginal health transition into reverse. The contrasting fates of poor whites and ‘unofficial blacks’ during the health transition demonstrate the health burdens of inequality and racial discrimination, and reveal that ‘the gap’ in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a historical product of long-term government policy and exclusion from citizenship and its entitlements.

Silent witnesses: Child health and well-being in England and Australia and the health transition 1870–1940

Abstract This study explores the ‘black box’ of changes in both the macro and micro – the societal and domestic – environment that transformed the health and well-being of children in England and Australia between 1870 and 1940. It argues that in addition to the control of environmental hazards and improved medical care, changes in family life made possible by the decline in the informal economy of casual work, provided the domestic security that enabled the major improvements in child health measures before immunisation and antibiotics. The golden age of childhood came after World War II, with the relief of peace and unparalleled stability in marriages and home making. Since the 1970s, however, capitalist societies have succumbed to a pursuit of affluence and individualism that has had profound psychic and physical effects and aggravated inequality and discontent: the obesity epidemic is the embodiment of that transformation.

The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1894-2004

Review(s) of: The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1894-2004 by Elaine McKewon, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, WA, 2005. pp. xii + 188.

Climate change and population policy: towards a just and transformational approach

38.95 paper.

Commentary on Stanesby et al. (2018): The importance of social change and trends in understanding increases in women's drinking in post-WWII Australia

This commentary discusses the timetable for effective action needed to prevent runaway climate change which calls for emergency speed responses in the following areas: strengthen energy efficiency build renewable energy capacity phase out fossil fuel use sequester carbon and implement adaptive strategies to ensure that the transition to low carbon future is managed as equitably and sustainably as possible. However it does comment on the number of reasons why it is already too late to look to population control as a significant source of short- to medium-term emission reductions.