The growing legitimation of complementary medicine in Australia: Successes and dilemmas

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century on the eve of the formation of Australia as a nation-state, the medical system in this emerging country could be best described as pluralistic in the sense that while regular or allopathic medicine constituted the predominant medical system, it was not clearly the dominant one. Regular physicians faced competition from a wide array of alternative practitioners. As regular medicine increasingly assumed the guise of being scientific, it evolved into biomedicine and developed a link with corporate and state interests in early twentieth century in Australia, just as was the case in other capitalist developed societies. Relying upon state support, biomedicine in Aus..