Social History of Medicine Advance Access published online on February 20, 2006
Social History of Medicine, doi:10.1093/shm/hkj007
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1 Centre for the Study of Health and Society, School of
Population Health, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010,
Australia
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. This paper investigates the conditions in which geriatric
medicine emerged in the state of Victoria between the late 1950s and the late
1970s. It shows how, in transforming a charity model of care into a medical
model of service, nascent geriatricians were caught up in the shifting balance
of responsibilities between state and Commonwealth governments in funding
health services and care for the aged, and in the efforts of a small segment of
the Australian medical profession to establish an organisational setting and
professional context for social medicine. In Victoria, the potential for
doctors to circumvent bureaucratic and professional limitations on their work
lay in their relationship with their institutional committees of management
whose members were drawn from the general community. The paper argues that
pioneer ‘geriatricians’ failed to establish a field of practice
that met all the needs they discerned in their patient group because they could
not change community ideas about appropriate responses to old age
infirmity.
Article
Medicine of Senescence or Managing a Hospital System: The
Resistible Rise of Geriatric Medicine in the State of Victoria
Cecily Hunter 1 *
Cecily Hunter, E-mail: cehunter{at}unimelb.edu.au
Abstract 
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