Herbalists and Chinese doctors

"Traditional Chinese doctors constituted a highly visible presence all across Australia from the 1850s to the 1950s. As the effects of the Immigration Restriction Act (informally known as the White Australia policy) of 1901 were felt, their numbers fell in the 1950s." p.80

"Even in the context of nineteenth-century British colonial rule, and with increasing discrimination against Chinese people in general, Chinese doctors continued to stake their claim as significant actors by performing essential medical services. Their understudied role helps to fundamentally challenge the popular idea of a “White Australia” having little input from or interaction with other peoples." p.81

Examining medicine from below, rather than relying only on a top-down state-centric framework reveals more than medical history—it reveals that the Australian population was more heterogenous in cultural practices than has been thought. In a general sense, Australians have recreated in popular media and in the scholarship, a mythical “White Australia” in which Chinese people have vanished from memory. Recovering historical voices through medical encounters corrects the misconception of an Australia in which Western scientific ideas dominated and in which there was little inter-imperial communication. People did form close relationships across cultural differences. As the Chinese herbalists show, not only were there countless medical encounters, but also many intermarriages." p.109

James Flowers, “Chinese-Medicine Doctors Healing Australians: On the Frontline of Healthcare from the Colonial Period to the Twenty-First Century”, Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives, Special Issue: The Question of Chineseness in Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporas, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp.79-108.</p>