The Australian Dominative Medical System: A Reflection of Social Relations in the Larger Society

Abstract

This paper posits a working or tentative model of medical pluralism, a pattern in which multiple medical sub-systems co-exist, or what I term the Australian dominative medical system. I argue that whereas the Australian medical system with its various medical sub-systems was pluralistic, that is more or less on an equal footing, in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it became a plural or dominative one in the sense that biomedicine came to clearly dominate other medical sub-systems. This paper also explores the growing interest of biomedicine and the Australian Government in complementary medicine to which Australians have increasingly turned over the course of the past t..