Chinese-Medicine Doctors Healing Australians: On the Frontline of Healthcare from the Colonial Period to the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This article traces Chinese-medicine doctors as an occupational group that played a key role in colonial Australian healthcare. The current narrative of recent history mostly credits prc migrants, beginning from the 1990s and the prc state in the 2000s, with the field’s achievement of professional registration. This established view is shortsighted and distorts the past. Rather, Chinese medicine traveled to Australia with Chinese migrants since the mid-nineteenth century; they brought with them sophisticated business acumen along with medical expertise, as seen in commercialized raw and patent medicines brought from a highly developed pharmaceutical industry in mainland China and Hong Kong. They were competitive with Western-trained doctors, as seen in court documents as well as in newspaper advertisements of the time, and established their status through lineage connections and acupuncture associations before any influence from the prc.