Pathologising white male sexuality in late nineteenth-century Australia through the medical prism of excess and constraint.

This paper will explore the constructions of white male sexuality in late nineteenth-century Australia by the medical profession. In a period where female sexuality was always suspect, male sexuality, too, was brought into question, and the male body was increasingly constructed as vulnerable to sexual excess and sexual pathology. If male sexuality was to be active and dynamic, this could readily go too far, rendering men merely a slip away from deviance. Here, I will consider these notions of excess and constraint through an examination of sexual norms and perceived perversions, including sexual excess, sodomy and masturbation.

The value of an infant: the rise of paediatrics in Australia, 1880-1910.

Between 1880 and 1910 paediatrics in Australia developed not merely as a response to Enlightenment philosophical understandings of the child as precious and special, but as part of a wider demand for reproduction and population. A brief sketch of the international context will situate the specific Australian conditions, which include education, professionalisation and the emerging concept of infant mortality. A level of general specialisation within medicine was necessary for the development of paediatrics, in addition to a general and new interest in child health, which was a response to the social, political and economic needs of the emerging nation.