‘Just a Quack Who Can Cure Cancer’: John Braund, and Regulating Cancer Treatment in New South Wales, Australia

Author:

DAWES LAURA L.

Abstract

AbstractIn 1948 the New South Wales government instituted an inquiry into the claims of John Braund – a 78-year-old self-described ‘quack’ – that his secret treatment had cured 317 cancer sufferers. The ‘Braund controversy’, as it became known, was one of Australia’s most prominent cases of medical fraud. This paper examines that controversy and its effects on cancer philanthropy, medical research, and especially on legislation regulating treatment providers up to the present. With the Braund controversy in mind, the New South Wales (NSW) parliament struggled to develop legislation that would protect patients and punish quacks but also allow for serendipitous, unorthodox discoveries. Recent decades saw new elements added to this calculus – allowing a wide-ranging health marketplace, and allowing patients to choose their therapies. This paper argues that the particular body of law legislatures used in regulating cancer treatment and how regulations were framed reflected the changing context of healthcare and illustrates the calculus legislatures have undertaken in regulating the health marketplace, variously factoring in public safety, serendipitous discovery, the authority of orthodox medicine, patient choice, and economic opportunity.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

History,Medicine (miscellaneous),General Nursing

Reference144 articles.

1. The more active state anti-cancer charities, such as the Queensland Cancer Trust (est. 1929) and, later, the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria (est. 1937), sought to educate the public about signs and symptoms of cancer and encourage people to seek medical attention early. These bodies drew on the experience of cancer charities in the US and the UK with which they were affiliated. For example, a Victorian pamphlet urged readers that '[e]very case of cancer is an emergency…. The early application of proper treatment is very necessary for the cure of cancer. In some forms the opportunities for a favourable result decrease with each week's delay'. (7-8). The message was 'do not delay' - also the core message of cancer education in America - and, indeed, the Victorian association used the American Society for the Control of Cancer's materials as the basis for its publications. The Queensland Cancer Trust used print material from the British Empire Cancer Campaign but teamed it with more strident publicity than the British approach. Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria, What Every Adult Should Know About Cancer (Melbourne: Royal Australian College of Surgeons, 1940)

2. Report, op. cit. (note 7). On the differing British and American approaches, see R.A. Aronowitz, 'Do Not Delay: Breast Cancer and Time, 1900-1970', Milbank Memorial Fund, 79 (2001), 355-86

3. E. Toon, "'Cancer as the General Population Knows It": Knowledge, Fear, and Lay Education in 1950s Britain', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81 (2007), 116-38.

4. Young and McFadyen, op. cit. (note 2).

5. NSW Parliamentary Debates, op. cit. (note 75), 924, 925. Compare with Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria, op. cit. (note 21), 15.

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