Crown Street Women's Hospital: A History 1893–1983 by Judith Godden

Abstract

Health & History ● 20/1 ● 2018 161 Tropical Medicine, Henry Wellcome, and his own clothing designed for the tropics. Sambon’s bravado often comes through strongly in his professional conflicts, but he also remains an enigma, understood through descriptions of him and his work by others that Ree has included. If Manson and others saw fit to describe Sambon as a kind of ‘genius’, the dominant fact of Sambon’s career is the thorough dismantling of his attempts to prove a germ-based aetiology for pellagra and cancer. If anything, Sambon’s work is a reminder of the way enthusiasm for germ theory prevented many in this period from recognising new ways of thinking about how environments shaped health and sickness. ALEXANDER CAMERON-SMITH UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Judith Godden, Crown Street Women’s Hospital: A History 1893– 1983 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017). ISBN: 978-1-74331-840-9 (PB). B&W illustrations. xvii + 382pp. Crown Street Women’s Hospital commanded an international reputation for clinical advances in the care of women, and for expertise in training doctors and midwives. In a wide ranging and detailed history, Judith Godden accounts for the highs and lows of this institution, usefully placing opposition to its eventual closure in 1983 in context. Initially called the ‘Women’s Hospital and Dispensary’ at Crown Street, the hospital began its life supporting home confinements for married women and offering training to women in midwifery nursing. Until then, the Benevolent Asylum had been inner city Sydney’s primary maternity service for the indigent. In the 1890s, cases of puerperal infection appeared in the asylum’s overcrowded lying-in wing. Doctors wanted the maternity patients housed in a separate building, in a bid to control infection, but the Board would not agree. Objecting doctors then established their Women’s Hospital and Dispensary. In 1903, when a proposed merger of the Women’s Hospital and Dispensary with the Benevolent Asylum failed, the asylum’s maternity service emerged as the Royal Hospital for Women a year later. Two services having ‘Women’s Hospital’in their titles generated confusion, and explains why Crown Street’s service became known, colloquially, by its location. 162 BOOK REVIEWS Unsurprisingly, funding and staffing shortages characterised Crown Street’s existence. Increasing demand, as women chose hospital birth over the vagaries of birth at home, was difficult to meet with scant funding. Through baby booms and technological advances, demands were different but unremitting. With its tiny footprint of land, building and refurbishing was a constant challenge too. Crown Street relied on trainee midwives for its bedside workforce. Short training terms and unattractive conditions of work resulted in a high throughput requiring constant recruitment. An intriguing episode in the hospital’s history of training nurses dates from 1906 when an Aboriginal woman, Miss May Yarrowick from northern NSW, was accepted as a trainee. Yarrowick’s enrolment challenges the accepted view that Australian Aboriginal women were barred from training as nurses until the 1950s. Godden’s text details milestones in maternity care: control of infection through sulphonamides and later penicillin, an ‘eclampsia campaign’ designed to ensure antenatal assessment for all patients, and the births of naturally-conceived triplets who survived, against the odds. Novel research in fertility treatment and twenty-four-hour anaesthetic coverage similarly rate a mention. Crown Street was a teaching hospital associated with the University of Sydney, and the sometimes fraught relationship between the two institutions is another theme in this history. A welcome element is an examination of adoption practices from the 1950s to the 1970s. Godden’s approach to this sensitive subject is to place practices and regulations within context. Acknowledging criticism levelled at Crown Street for encouraging and even forcing adoptions, Godden interrogates the evidence available, noting its limitations. First-hand evidence comes from married and single women’s birth data and interviews with staff, and there are sobering extracts from secondary source material. What Godden demonstrates is that some adoption practices, reported as the lot of single women, were applied equally to married women. With several lifelong employees, Crown Street’s prominent characters loom large in this history. By naming doctors, nurses, midwives, masseuses, pharmacists, interpreters, and benefactors, Godden’s history delivers a personable narrative. One well...