Touching on Deaths: A Medical History of Early Auckland Based on the First 384 Inquests (review)

The late Laurie Gluckman was a New Zealand-trained physician and psychiatrist with a keen interest in the medical history of his country. A founding member of Auckland's Medical History Society, he came into possession of a four-volume set of handwritten transcripts of the first 384 inquests held in Auckland following its settlement in 1840. On his retirement from medical practice in 1990, Gluckman set about transcribing and annotating these documents. He was still at work on this task when he died in April 1999, but sufficient material had been drafted to enable his wife, Ann, to see her husband's labors into print.

The result is a book that provides some interesting glimpses into the medical and social conditions of nineteenth-century Auckland. The first third of the book serves to situate the inquests in a number of (rather eclectically selected and unevenly handled) contexts. Gluckman gives a nice account of the region's physical environment, noting its relatively hospitable climate and largely benign flora and fauna. He provides information on the living conditions and intemperate social habits of the European settlers, and on Auckland's medical landscape—the qualifications (or lack thereof) of practitioners, the difficulties they faced in building up viable practices, and the medical infrastructure that was being built up around them. Gluckman also offers his readers biographical snapshots of the twenty medical men and one woman who feature at the inquests. In these sections, aspects of Maori life can be glimpsed (e.g., attitudes toward the treatment of the dead and dying), but this subject is not systematically considered.

The remaining two-thirds of the book consists of the texts of the 384 inquests transcribed, and in places annotated, by Gluckman. These inquests were presided over by five different coroners, each of whom was medically qualified. Gluckman makes some attempt to explain this deviation from contemporary English practice (where the vast majority of coroners were solicitors), but he does not provide enough detail on how Auckland coroners were appointed, and on what role inquests played in the social and institutional life of the settlement, to make a convincing case. Postmortems were surprisingly frequent at these early Auckland inquests: autopsies were held in 130 of the 384 cases, a rate that compares favorably to practice in most English districts. Eliminating the 111 drowning cases from the calculation raises the autopsy rate still higher, to nearly 50 percent of cases of suspicious death. Another noteworthy feature of these inquests is the large number of cases (91) that cite alcohol as either the primary or contributory cause of death. Gluckman suggests that many of these findings were gratuitous, reflecting a predisposition on the part of medical attendants to link an otherwise unexplained death to alcohol if the deceased's intemperate habits were known. If this is the case, it again marks a significant difference from English practice, where medical statisticians routinely criticized physicians for underreporting causes of death that might upset (and therefore alienate) surviving family members.

The transcripts of the cases themselves are of variable quality and interest: most are quite skeletal, with only the name, verdict, and a brief account of the medical evidence recorded. Others are more detailed, including testimony from various witnesses, jury "riders" (comment) on the verdict, and explanatory notes by Gluckman. While there is no overall index to the book, Gluckman has provided a breakdown of inquests by verdict, which allows the reader to select cases according to type. In preserving and contextualizing this rare trove of documents, Touching on Deaths has done a service to medical and social historians of nineteenth-century New Zealand.