Australian Witness to Science and Medicine

Introduction

The Centre for Health and Society supports a series of public history programs on Australian science and medicine. These Australian Witness to Science and Medicine forums are inspired by the Witness to Twentieth Century Medicine series staged by The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.

The program is built around a seminar series. The day's program will include invited speakers, audio-visual presentations and round table discussions. The round tables is an exercise in public oral history, where an invited panel of witnesses to a significant area of medical research and/or clinical practice and/or public health can reflect on their work and its consequences.

The sessions are recorded and the archive of scientific papers, film, audio tapes, illustrations and transcriptions of the day's proceedings converted into an electronic form for wider dissemination and future research. Funding will be sought to produce multi-media versions where appropriate.

The Purpose

Medical science and clinical practice have transformed the biological experience of human beings since the 1920s, and most of this work is still within living memory. Australian researchers and clinicians have played an outstanding part in that explosion of knowledge, far out of proportion to the size of our population and to the extent of our geographical remoteness from the world centres of learning. Like sport, medical science, is one of those things that Australians have been remarkably good at.

So much has happened and yet very little of it has been recorded and evaluated by historians of science and medicine. It is vital that an oral record be collected as soon as possible, and that record should be intellectually rigorous and well-informed. The Witness Round Tables will be 'peer-reviewed oral history', where former and present colleagues can share and stimulate each other's memories, and relive the drama of the work.

The seminars can bring to light the work, ideas and debates that never reached the clinical literature-material that may be crucial to the history of the field but which is normally lost to the historical record. Often the mistakes, by-ways and disproven hypotheses can be as important as the final result in the history of knowledge.

The seminars will make public the theatre of medicine and science. At a time when we sorely need to motivate our most gifted young people to consider science and research as a career, this should open up the remembered world of past work to the uninitiated. The seminars aim to draw the wider community into the debates we must have about the consequences of our interventions in nature.

It is believed that Australian Witness will make a powerful contribution to the public understanding of science and medicine, and we invite your interest and involvement.