Fannie Eleanor Williams: Bacteriologist and Serologist

2007

The interwar period in Australian medicine was a time of gradual but sustained evolution. By the eve of the Second World War, the Australian medical landscape differed markedly from the environment of 1919. However, unlike the changes wrought by the rapid technical advances of the fin de siècle period – or those that followed in the postwar boom – clinical medicine was not revolutionised during the 1920s and 30s. Rather, the more profound shifts occurred at political and institutional levels, as the health system faltered toward increasing federal control prior to wartime nationalisation and postwar socialisation. Perhaps it is this gradual process of systemic change, that explains the relative paucity of historiography addressing Australian medical research during the interwar years. This thesis proposes that the decades after World War I were pivotal for the establishment of a viable medical research industry in Australia. In particular, it focuses on the efforts, achievements and failures of Charles Halliley Kellaway (1889–1952), who was the director of Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) from 1923 until 1944. I argue that Kellaway successfully negotiated the substantial cultural and institutional pressures that operated against the establishment of a local medical research infrastructure. Indeed, during the interwar years several embryonic research ventures either failed to thrive or collapsed completely. Against these pressures, institutions for full-time medical research in Australia had to build public and political acceptance of the value of their work, not least in order to secure ongoing funds through the parsimonious Depression years. Workers in this nascent field had to convince the medical profession of the need for local investigations, while encouraging their ambitious colleagues to remain in Australia despite more alluring international opportunities. The bulk of this dissertation evaluates how Kellaway’s personal qualities, beliefs and actions contributed to the overall success of the WEHI within the wider social, political and scientific milieu of the interwar period. The specific focus of this analysis is the years 1928–37, which I propose was the crucial decade for building the institutional and cultural underpinnings of Australian medical science. At the beginning of 1928, Kellaway had just negotiated the first ad-hoc federal grant for medical research, and was also invited to chair one of the first Australian Royal Commissions comprised entirely of medical professionals. These two political achievements helped determine his course for the following decade, as Kellaway steered the nascent WEHI through the optimism of the late twenties and the subsequent threat of closure at the nadir of the Depression. By 1937 he had secured his own international scientific reputation in snake venom research and had fostered the career of many budding local investigators, particularly his talented understudy, Frank Macfarlane Burnet. In that same year, the first meeting of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) formalised the funding system Kellaway had pioneered, ensuring a degree of ongoing financial stability for all local research centres. Thus, unlike many of his contemporaries, Kellaway succeeded not only in achieving his institutional goals for the WEHI, but had moreover contributed to the wider acceptance and security of medical research in Australia.

Women's History Review, 2005

The 'woman doctor question' was a title given to the public debates that erupted in early twentieth-century New South Wales (Australia) over the employment of women doctors in general hospitals. Two wellqualified women, Drs Susie O'Reilly and Jessie Aspinall, were rejected from hospital residencies in Sydney, which led a wide variety of groups and individuals to mobilise in print, not only to denounce the specific rejections but also to challenge the gendered thinking that underpinned them. The arguments and rhetoric of the newspaper debates turned on notions of 'appropriate' women's work, the gendered world of hospitals, and assumptions about the gendered nature of medical practice itself. Public discussions of the 'woman doctor question' provide a rich source for historians, although for some reason they have been previously overlooked. While the rejection episodes have long formed part of the mythic world of pioneering women in Australia (having been seized upon by early historians as vivid examples of women's professional disadvantage), the deeper cultural meanings and consequences embedded in these debates have been neglected. This article investigates the course of the debates and why they were so passionately contested. Examining the rhetoric used during 'all this fuss' (as one participant dismissively phrased it) highlights the significance of the gendered body for the ways in which medical practice was perceived, and ultimately, for how medicine was practised.

Prometheus, 2015

Health and History, 1998

T h e first books to be printed in English on medical science and applied chemistry, and attributed to women, we re publish ed in th e l6 50s. Elizabeth Grey's A Choice ManuaL a/Rare Conceits (1653), Queen Henrietta Maria's The Queen 's CLoset Opened ( 1655) and Alethea Ta lbot's Natura Exenterata (165 5), emerged after a thirty-yea r moratorium on any new books of pharmacy, household science and medicin e for women, and possibly up to fifty years, in so me parts, after being written. My earlier chapter in this collec tion , 'Women a nd Domestic Medicin e'(see above , pp . 89-10 7), investigated some of th e co ntexts for the manu sc ripts: the social and perso nal history of the writers, hou sehold work for women during the period, the parti cipation of women in medical science in particular, and as pec ts of their education a nd aristocratic status. I was concerned to ask what kind of science they were engaged in , and how and whether it fitted into our understanding of form al training at the time. The seco n~ part of this study will fo cus on the circle of Katherine Jon es, Lady Ranelagh m the 1640-60 period, and add the following questions: how were people at the time doing science, wh ere were they doing it, why did they do it, and how were the women practitioners in particular perceived by those around them.

Medical History

Acadiensis, 2001

IN MAY 1919 MARGARET LOW was hard at work in her Halifax home, patiently cutting histological sections with a microtome, mounting slides and taking them up to Dalhousie University's Medical School, where students used them in their studies. 1 Low had attended the medical college from 1900 to 1902 although she never completed her medical education. Instead, she worked first in the university's medical science laboratories and then in Halifax's Pathological Institute during its formative years between the world wars. For nearly 30 years Low was a dynamic presence among laboratory workers, offering "faithful and efficient service". She was often responsible for training other women and was remembered by her co-workers as the unquestioned authority in the day-today work in the lab. Her value was evident in 1927-28 when, due to the extended absence of the director, Low was responsible for supervising laboratory operations. 2 Despite the contributions of Margaret Low and others like her who quietly toiled in hospital and university laboratories and despite the current recognition that laboratories were a significant development in the history of public health, the rise of "scientific medicine" and the modernization of medical education, we know very little about the internal workings of such laboratories or their staff, particularly in the North American context. 3 What attention has been given to this area has focused invariably 1 D. Fraser Harris to Dr. A.S. MacKenzie, 6 November 1919, A-573, President's Office Correspondence, Dalhousie University Archives, [DUA]. The research for this work was funded through a Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine Doctoral Fellowship as a SSHRC doctoral fellowship. I am extremely grateful for the suggestions of the anonymous Acadiensis reviewers, those of Shirley Tillotson and members of the faculty-graduate seminar at Dalhousie and the support and encouragement of Michael Cross. 2 For information about Low, see D.J. MacKenzie, "The Origin and

This paper seeks to probe politically engaged Australian scientists who were prepared to desert their ivory towers, exchange the laboratory for the soapbox and assume social responsibility during the swiftly changing political environment of the 1940s. It will examine these scientists through the lens of the Australian Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), which vigorously resisted the push for science to serve the needs of the state and, equally robustly, defended the long-held but increasingly besieged tradition of social responsibility in science. The paper will examine this tradition: that science was not an endeavour that occurred in isolation, but was – and should be – influenced by society. In assessing whether the goals pursued by AASW scientists altered during the early Cold War, or whether they remained largely consistent with pre-war and wartime goals, the paper will argue that the AASW was ill-prepared for, and overwhelmed by, the speed with which Cold War anti-communism moved from the margins to the mainstream of social and political life. Phillip Deery and Lachlan Clohesy, '‘Patronised servants’: Australian scientists in the 1940s', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 99, no. 2, December 2013, pp. 114-32.

In 2009 Elizabeth Blackburn (along with two of her American colleagues) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, confirming her position as a global scientific leader. She was immediately celebrated as Australia's first woman Nobel laureate. However, although 2009 was a 'bumper' year for women Nobel laureates, with five winners in total, the media coverage soon became highly negative and discouraging. Much discussion focused not on Blackburn's scientific work but on her gender -the difficulties it was assumed she must have faced individually as a woman scientist, and her wider leadership role in encouraging and supporting other women to overcome these obstacles. In this chapter I suggest the continuing highly negative ways the possibilities for women's participation and leadership in science are discussed are counterproductive. Journalistic, policy and scholarly discussions of the 'problem' of women in science misconstrue the extent of women's participation in the field and the nature of their experiences. In all these spheres, science continues to be understood and represented as an unhappy place for women to be. This misrepresentation, I argue, undercuts the leadership roles women scientists are seeking.

Journal of the History of Biology, 2014

In 1916, a 41 years old woman with little formal scientific education became the secretary of the New York Aquarium (NYA). In becoming the Aquarium's first female officer, Ida M. Mellen realized her lifelong dream of successfully pursuing a career in the biological sciences and broke with the limitations and low expectations surrounding her sex and class backgrounds. By 1930, Mellen left the NYA and pursued a career in popular hobbyist writing, becoming the foremost expert on aquarium fishes and domesticated cats in the United States. Margaret Rossiter and other historians of science have illuminated women's common career paths in the sciences, but little work has been done on individuals whose gender and class impacted their career. Building on Rossiter's framework, this case study suggests that class, as much as gender, structured the scientific career of women. Through the narrative of the outsider scientific practitioner, we can more fully illuminate the social structure of scientific work. Examining the struggles of Mellen to enter and maintain a scientific career sheds light, not just on her own career path, but those alternately closed to her. If we wish to understand science in the early twentieth century, especially questions of inclusion and exclusion in the scientific process, we must examine those individuals who operated on the periphery of the "traditional" scientific path.

Immunology and Cell Biology, 2021

The topic of women in science usually draws immediate mention of Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, first in physics in 1903 (with her husband Pierre), and then in chemistry in 1911. Or more recently, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s groundbreaking work in gene editing, which won them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their win marked the first time a science-related Nobel Prize was shared by women and no men. Many other remarkable women have made revolutionary contributions to the advancement of science over the years. In our “Trailblazing Women Immunologists in Australia and New Zealand” Virtual Issue of Immunology & Cell Biology (ICB), we celebrate the achievements of women who made groundbreaking discoveries, challenged the dogma of the time and left a formidable legacy within Australia and New Zealand. Historically, many notable women in science, including chemist and noblewoman, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, were merely seen as the wives or sist...