Eighteen years after James Cook landed in Australia in 1770, the First Fleet arrived, carrying convicts, marines, and physicians. The colony’s surgeons faced overwhelming challenges—starvation, malnutrition, and disease—in a climate much unlike Britain’s. Dr. John White, the principal surgeon, recorded in his journals the “fevers, fluxes, and scorbutic afflictions” that plagued both prisoners and guards. Medicines were scarce, and many drugs spoiled in the heat or damp.
Improvisation became essential. The colonists had to use native plants for poultices and tonics, and the doctors treated the sick with what little European medicine remained: calomel, laudanum, and vinegar. The first hospital was a cluster of tents and huts made from local timber, a testing ground for colonial medicine where climate, insects, water quality, and diet forced a reconsideration of many Old-World assumptions about disease.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the pharmacology of the Indigenous peoples was based on native flora such as tea tree (Melaleuca) leaves for antiseptics, eucalyptus smoke for respiratory ailments, and wattle gum for wounds. Colonial doctors occasionally adopted such indigenous practices such as using tea tree oil as an antiseptic. Although most Europeans dismissed Indigenous medicine as superstition, survival often depended on knowledge of local plants, water sources, and environmental warning signs.
From the very outset of their arrival, the settlers faced intense heat, unfamiliar insects, and poor sanitation. Dysentery, fever, and skin infections were constant. The lack of fresh vegetables revived scurvy among convicts, undoing Cook’s earlier success. The colony’s physicians slowly learned that public health required clean water, proper housing, and nutrition. In addition, the exile produced a psychological pathology. Letters and journals spoke of “colonial melancholy” and “settler’s madness,” reflecting isolation, homesickness, and despair.
Only in time as the colony matured did the medical infrastructure improve and the early canvas wards evolve into permanent hospitals. Diseases such as smallpox and typhus prompted the crude but effective quarantine measures that became the first Australian public health laws. Later many of the early physicians, trained in Edinburgh or London, brought Enlightenment concepts of hygiene and humanitarianism that slowly replaced punitive neglect. The hospital became a symbol of compassion as well as a tool of authority in the new society. Indigenous wisdom at first coexisted uneasily with European science, but, in the end, necessity drove science and innovation to the edge of the known world.
Further reading
- Cook, James. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. Edited by JC Beaglehole. Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955–1967.
- Banks, Joseph. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962.
- Cumpston, JHL. Health and Disease in Australia: A History. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Health, 1989.