Medical science and clinical practice have transformed the biological experience of human beings, especially since the 1920s, and most of this work is still within living memory. Australian researchers and clinicians have played an outstanding part in this knowledge explosion, far out of proportion to the size of the population and in spite of Australia's geographical remoteness from respected centres of learning.

So much has happened in Australia, and yet very little of it has been recorded and evaluated by historians of science and medicine. It is vital that an intellectually rigorous and well-informed oral record be collected as soon as possible.

The Australian Witness to Science and Medicine Seminars are inspired by the Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine series, conducted by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL since the early 1990s.

The Australian Witness program is built around a series of day-long seminars that include audio-visual presentations and round table discussions during which participants in a significant area of medical or scientific research and/or clinical practice and/or public health reflect on their work and review its consequences. The seminars are an exercise in peer-reviewed oral history, a means by which the recollections of witnesses can be stimulated and the drama of their work relived.

The seminars are recorded and the day's proceedings converted into an electronic form for wider dissemination and future research. They bring to light the inner workings, ideas and debates that never reached the clinical literature - material that may be crucial to the history of the field, but which is normally lost to the historical record.

At a time when motivating talented young people to consider science and research as a career has become a national priority and when debate is on-going about the consequences of human intervention in natural processes, the Australian Witness Seminar series is making a powerful contribution to the public understanding of science and medicine.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the contributions of the following people in the production of this online resource:

Helen Morgan and Ailie Smith, eScholarship Research Centre
Professor Janet McCalman and Imogen Knight

This project was made possible through a grant from the Australian Society of the History of Medicine.

Dr Ann Westmore, Editor
October 2016

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine