A mystery to the medical world : Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the risk of civilisation Shellam, Tiffany 2012, A mystery to the medical world : Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the risk of civilisation, History Australia, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 110-135. Attached Files Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads Title A mystery to the medical world : Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the risk of civilisation Author(s) Shellam, Tiffany orcid.org/0000-0001-8521-7564 Journal name History Australia Volume number 9 Issue number 1 Start page 110 End page 135 Total pages 26 Publisher Monash University ePress Place of publication Melbourne, Vic. Publication date 2012-04 ISSN 1449-0854 1833-4881 Keyword(s) Aboriginal history missionaries nostalgia social statistics history - colonialism Summary In 1860 Florence Nightingale conducted a study on the mortality rates of indigenous children attending native colonial schools across the British Empire. Her study was driven by the question: ‘Can we civilise the natives without killing them?’ One colonial school that participated in the survey was New Norcia Benedictine mission in Western Australia. When Rosendo Salvado, the mission’s superintendent, responded, he drew on his daily encounters with the Yuat people, his statistics on the mission residents and his Benedictine philosophy of civilisation and conversion of colonised peoples. The correspondence between Salvado and Nightingale took place in the climate of intense debates about Aboriginal health, colonisation and extinction in Britain and the colonies. While many settlers and colonial observers understood Aboriginal depopulation to be the result of either the vices and diseases of unprincipled Europeans or an unstoppable destiny, whether Divine Providence or natural selection, Nightingale and Salvado shared a belief in practical solutions to what they understood to be a practical problem. Their collaboration is an example of the humanitarian opposition to the racial pessimism of Social Darwinism. They both sought to use the recently influential intellectual discipline of social statistics to support their conviction that Aborigines, if patiently and carefully handled, would survive the admittedly risky process of civilisation. Language eng Field of Research 210301 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History Socio Economic Objective 970121 Expanding Knowledge in History and Archaeology HERDC Research category C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal Persistent URL http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30048910 Document type: Journal Article Collections: Alfred Deakin Research Institute School of Humanities and Social Sciences Related Links Link Description Connected to published version Go to link with your DU access privileges     Unless expressly stated otherwise, the copyright for items in DRO is owned by the author, with all rights reserved. Versions Version Filter Type Fri, 05 Oct 2012, 14:07:53 EST Fri, 05 Oct 2012, 14:08:52 EST Wed, 10 Oct 2012, 13:51:47 EST Tue, 16 Oct 2012, 14:55:30 EST Wed, 17 Oct 2012, 10:57:19 EST Wed, 17 Oct 2012, 10:58:40 EST Fri, 12 Apr 2013, 11:34:02 EST Fri, 12 Apr 2013, 13:11:48 EST Fri, 13 Jun 2014, 16:00:07 EST Sat, 05 May 2018, 02:33:00 EST Filtered Full Citation counts:   Cited 0 times in TR Web of Science Cited 4 times in Scopus Search Google Scholar Access Statistics: 468 Abstract Views, 4 File Downloads  -  Detailed Statistics Created: Fri, 05 Oct 2012, 14:07:52 EST by Tiffany Shellam

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