"A Nasty Bump": Lessons from Refugee Doctors' Defiance of Discrimination, 1937-1950.

Prominent members of the Australian medical profession sought to prevent European doctors who immigrated to Australia in the late 1930s and 1940s from practising medicine. This article explores how these so-called "refugee doctors" contested the major strategies used by Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland statutory medical boards, influenced by the British Medical Association - Australian doctors' peak body - to impede their medical practice. In Australia's eastern States, refugee doctors challenged refusals to grant them registration to practise medicine, appealed decisions to deregister them, and practised medicine while unregistered. The article also considers lessons we might learn from this history, including the importance of reducing the potential for international medical graduates to whom Australia grants refuge to experience unfair obstacles both to practising their profession and challenging discrimination against them. Equally important is to remove temptations for them to practise medicine without registration and lower the risk of them doing so.

Hartnett, Epstein, Van der Hope: Regulating Unconventional Doctors.

Doctors Francis Timothy Hartnett, Zygmunt Epstein and Izso Hartmayer Van der Hope were the first medical practitioners to appeal against decisions of the Medical Board of Victoria (Board) to cancel doctors' registration to practise medicine after finding that they had engaged in infamous conduct in a professional respect. This article analyses the Board's decisions in the 1940s regarding these three doctors and their appeals. The article argues that the doctors were unconventional and the Board's members, whose own career successes were built on their adherence to custom, allowed their aversion to the doctors' nonconformity to compromise their impartial assessment of their behaviour. The Board had only the finding of infamous conduct and the sanction of deregistration with which to respond to doctors; conduct that fell below professional standards, but in these three cases, cancellation of the doctors' registration to practise medicine was unduly severe and disproportionate to the gravity of their behaviour. This investigation illustrates the importance of the passage of legislation - after these cases were heard - empowering the Board to impose more lenient sanctions than deregistration for doctors' unprofessional conduct. It also highlights that regulators of the medical profession must still ensure that any antipathy they may feel towards doctors for their unconventionality does not influence their assessment of a fitting response to their conduct.

Moritz Meyer and the Medical Board: Preventing Refugee Doctors from Practising Medicine in Victoria, Australia, 1937-1958.

In 1937, the Medical Board of Victoria (the Board) declined to register Moritz Meyer to practise medicine in Victoria, Australia. Meyer was a Jewish doctor who had completed his medical degree in Germany and obtained postgraduate qualifications in Scotland. Meyer successfully challenged the Board's decision in the Supreme Court of Victoria and the Board's appeal against that decision to the High Court of Australia, which was dismissed. In response to Meyer's victory, the Board, under the influence and together with the British Medical Association, successfully lobbied the Victorian Parliament to prevent doctors from practising medicine in Victoria unless they had completed their studies in Victoria or in a country in which Victorian doctors, by virtue of their registration in Victoria, were entitled to practise medicine. Meyer's case received substantial press coverage, but historians have referred to it only in passing. This article fills a notable gap in the historiography about this period by illuminating the significance of Meyer's matter. It analyses the decisions in this case and considers their impact on European doctors who sought refuge in Victoria immediately before, during and after World War II, and on the medical profession and lay community. It then seeks to explain these reactions to Meyer's matter.

A delayed inheritance: the Medical Board of Victoria's 75-year wait to find doctors guilty of "infamous conduct in a professional respect".

The Medical Board of Victoria (Board) was created in 1844 to register "legally qualified medical practitioners". It was not until 1933, however, that the Board attained the power to remove from its register a doctor who had engaged in "infamous conduct in a professional respect" (the power), even though the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom on which the Board was modelled had been granted the power 75 years earlier. This article argues that the delay in the Board's inheritance was attributable to successive Victorian Parliaments' distrust of the Board and that this attitude was unwarranted, at least from early in the 20th century. The article maintains that the granting of the power to the Board was a crucial event in the history of the regulation of the Victorian medical profession. This is illustrated both by the difficulty encountered by the medical profession in dealing with doctors' unethical conduct before 1933, and the Board's concern to use its new authority responsibly and appropriately to protect the public and the profession in the three years after it attained the power.