We Are the Rebels by Clare Wright Page A

which the diggers had used
as latrines became putrid cesspools.
    Sarah Skinner lay in her own flimsy tent, listening to the wind and rain howl as
she struggled to deliver her baby into this sodden world. For Sarah, everything burned.
Near the end of labour, her brow ran with sweat and her tender, swollen skin stretched
like taut canvas around the baby’s head. A final push and a tearing of flesh: she
screamed; the baby wailed. William Skinner stood by, frantic with worry, as Sarah
gave birth to a live and healthy baby boy.
    Two weeks later, an inquest was held into Sarah’s death. Midwife Jane Julian testified.
She was not a regular midwife, she said, but had attended a few females in their
confinement . She’d done her best. On the day after the birth Sarah was well, sitting
up, nursing her baby and laughing with her older child. But that night, said Jane,
the new mother was seized with cold shivering . The doctor, William Wills (father
of the famous explorer who died in the desert with Burke), attributed Sarah’s fever
to her milk coming in.
    Over the next week Sarah became sicker. Now Dr Wills diagnosed puerperal peritonitis ,
a terrible killer of nineteenth-century women. He ordered the standard treatment:
turpentine injections into the abdomen, turpentine enemas and blistering of the
bowel, followed by an application of mercury to the open wounds. Opium every two
hours.
    Sarah’s baby fell ill too, and died by the end of his first week without ever being
named. Dr Wills gave weakness as the official cause of death. Sarah was too fragile
to attend the quiet burial. She knew what it looked like; she had already put two
other babies in the ground.
    A distressed William Skinner fetched another medical man, Dr Stewart, who considered
the baby’s death to have been caused by the mother’s milk . Dr Stewart observed Sarah’s
deteriorating condition and, though he continued her enemas and blistering, claimed it was beyond human skill to save her life .
    Almost two weeks after the birth—two days after his son’s funeral—William Skinner
held his wife’s limp, clammy hand for the last time.
    At Sarah’s inquest on 25 May, the Coroner pronounced that the woman had died from natural causes . A jury of William’s peers added a rider to the verdict: We consider
that if a little more attention had have been paid the deceased by the medical man
her days might have been prolonged .
    The widowed William Skinner was, in a strange way, one of the lucky ones. Although
his wife’s body was a bloated, festering, bloody pulp by the time the doctors had
finished with her, he had at least managed to get a doctor. He could console himself,
perhaps, that he had not failed her completely…
    Another miner, Patrick Carey, was out shooting possums for dinner when his baby son
died from the fever that had racked him for days. The Coroner asked Patrick why he
hadn’t sent for medical assistance. His reply: Because we had not a blessed sixpence
in the tent .
    SEPSIS AND ANTISEPSIS
    In the mid-nineteenth century, very few women faced childbirth free of the fear
of death. Infection of the reproductive tract following labour often led to ‘puerperal
peritonitis’—what we would now call postpartum infection. And that led, more often
than not, to an early grave. As recently as the 1940s, maternal death was the second-biggest
killer (after tuberculosis) of Australian women aged fifteen to forty-nine. It is
not even in the top ten leading causes of death today.
    Lack of medical knowledge was the problem. For over two thousand years, doctors believed
that ill health was caused by an imbalance of ‘humors’: a build-up of bad fluids
in the body. Cures therefore depended on extracting the excess humors through primitive
methods like bleeding, leeching and cupping.
    In the 1860s Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough discoveries in the ‘germ theory’ of disease
changed things, and medicine began treating the growth and spread of micro-organisms
in