COMPREHENSIVE NEW HISTORY OF MAORI HEALTH LAUNCHED
Maori Health and Government Policy, 1840-1940
A history tracing official efforts to meet Maori health needs during the first hundred years of organised European
settlement in New Zealand was launched today.
Maori Health and Government Policy, 1840-1940 by Derek Dow is published by the Heritage Branch of the Department of
Internal Affairs and Victoria University Press.
This important study focuses on policy initiatives rather than health outcomes.
Drawing on a wide range of sources and making frequent reference to individual circumstance, Derek Dow traces the varied
response of successive governments to Maori health needs.
He shows how health services for Maori developed in an ad hoc fashion, with marked differences between localities in the
provision and quality of health care. This account of an essentially piecemeal policy helps to place later developments
in context.
Maori Health and Government Policy, 1840-1940 explores four major themes:
· the administration and funding of Maori health;
· the association between Maori and hospitals;
· the subsidised medical officers who provided primary health care;
· infection control and sanitary measures.
Other topics include the role of missionary medicine in the 1840s, attempts to improve the health status of Maori
children and Maori health research.
This comprehensive study ends in 1940 with the implementation of the 1938 Social Security Act under which hospital care
became free for all New Zealanders and the general medical service benefit was introduced with it?s consequent changes
to the nature of General Practice.
Derek Dow is a freelance historian who published extensively on hospitals and other medical institutions during eleven
years as a medical archivist in Scotland. Since emigrating to New Zealand in 1990 he has written an Annotated
Bibliography for the History of Medicine in New Zealand (1994) and, also for the Historical Branch, Safeguarding the
Public Health : A History of the New Zealand Department of Health (1995).
For further information contact Pamela Fleming , media adviser, Dept. Internal Affairs DD 04 495 9436, Fax 04 495 7237,
email: pamela.fleming@dia.govt.nz , Website www.dia.govt.nz