Sanatorium of the South? Public Health and Politics in Hobart and Launceston, 1875-1914

By Stefan Petrow, Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1995, 218 pages, paperback, $20.00. Reviewed by Philippa Watt in the issue.

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Stephen Petrow claims that his book, Sanatorium of the South?, is a ground breaking book. This may be so, but few would want to follow in his wake. He also claims that his book is the first to examine in detail the public health reforms instituted by city municipal councils in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries within a comparative regional format. This is true - and the result is tedious, uninspiring and unenlightening.

The book's blurb promises a dramatic line of argument: Tasmania as the sanatorium of the Australian colonies, 'an island where the sick could gain new vitality', an island to which tourists and immigrants were drawn, but which in reality was a place scourged by epidemics, a place where 'death became an everyday occurrence'. The stated aim of the text is thus to examine the cause of these epidemics and health problems caused by poor sanitation and to assess both the changing role and the effectiveness of the responsible authorities - the city councils of Hobart and Launceston.

What the reader finds, however, is a narrative drowning in minutiae of detail and reeking of the provincialism which so strongly permeated the operations of the municipalities under examination. Petrow's failure to place his material within the context of world developments in science and medical theory is remarkable. So too is his failure to contextualise his material within the climate of public health reform movements occurring as close to hand as the mainland. Instead, the reader is led through a muddled and muddied chronology of council debates, staff appointments, power-broking, voting procedures and implementation of one-legged reforms. Factors such as the role of women in lobbying for health reform and the health and environmental effects of dumping untreated sewerage, if pursued, could provide real insight and input into current-day debate. However, they are dropped as quickly as they are raised. Opportunities to sketch the broader picture of municipal and social health reform or to link in to contemporary issues are wasted by Petrow and this makes for a very unsatisfying text.

The book is the first of a monograph series published by the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, of which Petrow is Chairman. A reworking of Petrow's Masters thesis, it is poorly edited and riddled with sentences that lack clarity. The illustrations it contains are only remotely related to the text and appear to have been incorporated as an afterthought. Moreover, the many graphs containing empirical evidence are not integrated into the argument of the text, but are expected to stand as argument in their raw form. From this starting point, the output of the Association can only improve.

Citation

• Philippa Watt. 'Review: Sanatorium of the South? Public Health and Politics in Hobart and Launceston, 1875-1914 by Stefan Petrow' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), . Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 20 June 2013].