Bubonic Plague comes to Sydney in 1900
From Faculty of Medicine Online Museum and Archive
Australia suffered greatly from the effects of bubonic plague in the first two decades of the 20th century. The Australian colonial government had been wary of plague arriving in Sydney via shipping trade routes since the 1894 outbreak in Hong Kong. When plague did reach Australia in 1900, the response was one of panic and dread, fuelled by the knowledge of the history and ravenous potential of the disease. Many medical practitioners and scientists still believed the disease was essentially a human infection and spread through human contact with the infected. However, health authorities were aware of the building evidence that plague epidemics were associated with an epizootic infection in rats and began to incorporate preventative strategies to prevent its entry through the ports.
Despite this effort, bubonic plague reared its ugly head in Sydney on 19 January 1900. Australia's first victim was Arthur Paine, a 33 year old delivery man whose daily work brought him into contact with Central Wharf. The diagnosis was made by Dr Sinclair Gillies, an honorary assistant physician at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
There were 12 major plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925 as ships imported wave after wave of infection. Government health archives record 1371 and 535 deaths. Sydney was hit hardest, but the disease also spread to North Queensland while more sporadic cases were documented in Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle.
Chief Medical Officer, John Ashburton Thompson, appointed Sydney Medical School graduates to build a fledgling public health department. Frank Tidswell (MB ChM 1892) was appointed Bacteriologist and William George Armstrong(MB ChM 1888) and Robert Dick (MB ChM 1892) were appointed as Medical Officers to the City of Sydney. Thompson, Armstrong and Tidswell went on to produce outstanding research on plague and are credited with developing 20th century scientific understandings of plague, in particular that Yersinia pestis is spread to humans by fleas from infected rats. Their work was a large part of a revolution of social medicine in Australia. The knowledge that infectious diseases could be spread from one human to another by insects and that infection could be derived from animals, brought public health into scientific scrutiny.