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clip 1Clip description
A fixed camera films the inside of an operating theatre in the Henry Meeks Pavilion of the hospital; a slow pan shows medical staff at work in the laboratory; another pan reveals a 'Violet Ray Atelier’ set up in a room nearby; and the David and A Syme X-ray Building is shown from the exterior and interior. The stretcher where the patient would be placed is also shown.
Curator’s notes
In some ways, these are disturbing images, even though there are no medical procedures or patients are shown. The slow pans across the different sections of these operating and X-ray wings vividly conjure images of the dark days of medicine, and the crudeness of the medical implements seen in this clip hints at a time long passed. But what appears primitive today was actually quite progressive. According to the hospital’s own website, by the 1920s it was ‘experimenting with '“x-ray” treatment for cancers’, and only seven years after this was filmed, the Austin Hospital became the largest cancer hospital in Australia. Today, it continues to be a highly respected cancer research and treatment facility.
