'The Power of the Physician': Doctors and the 'Dying Maori' in Early Colonial New Zealand

Abstract

Throughout most of the nineteenth century it was a commonplace that Maori were either reducing in numbers, or dying out. Virtually all authors writing about New Zealand at the time commented on it, as have most authors since. The gradual depopulation of Maori was a contemporary locus classicus of 'native' extinction, discussed from the British parliament to Bengali journals.1 The elegy for the Maori race was delivered many times; testimonials were given, and monuments were built. Today, such a general decline in the nineteenth-century Maori population is still accepted, but the timing, extent and causes of this have been considerably revised. The size of the nineteenth-century Maori population remains robustly contested.2 Even the government censuses, the first solid figures when they were finally taken, have been shown to be inaccurate.3