Machinations of the British Medical Association: Excluding Refugee Doctors from Queensland’s Medical Profession, 1937–1942

Abstract

Abstract When medical practitioners fled from the Nazi regime in the 1930s, the British Medical Association (hereafter BMA), the representative body of the medical profession in the British Empire, agitated strenuously to prevent ‘refugee doctors’, as they were described, from practising medicine throughout the Empire. Prominent BMA representatives pursued this agenda in Australia through their appointment to statutory state-based authorities that registered and regulated doctors'. This article investigates how, between 1937 and 1942, they sought to use those bodies’ registration and disciplinary powers in Queensland to exclude refugee doctors. They were particularly persistent in this state given its government's resistance to BMA pressure to pass legislation restricting refugee doctors’ eligibility for registration. In so doing, the article contributes new perspectives to scholarship that analyses the BMA’s effectiveness as a pressure group. This article’s exploration of motives for the BMA’s animosity towards refugee doctors also builds on histories of the medical profession and of ethnicity within it.