The pioneering nurse behind one of our longest running medical services
Dulcie Flower's work in healthcare stretches back decades, when she established one of the longest-running Aboriginal healthcare centres in the country. In a reflective interview on Living Black with Karla Grant, the veteran nurse, activist and 2024 NAIDOC Lifetime Achievement Award winner reflected on her decades of advocacy - from the referendum campaign to helping establish the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern. A proud Meriam woman, Flower was the first Torres Strait Islander to receive the national honour.
Dulcie Flower - Helping Our People 'I think it was the biggest compliment I've ever been [given],' she said. In the 1960s, Flower worked closely with leaders like Faith Bandler, Pastor Doug Nicholls and Joe McGinness as part of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI). Their campaigning helped deliver the 1967 referendum — a landmark moment that saw over 90% of Australians vote to remove two discriminatory clauses from the Constitution. 'It meant that women could have child endowment, there could be a pension given to widows. It meant people could bank money,' she said. 'They could not control their own money. They could not leave wills. They were considered, uh, not having the capacity to make wills. So all this sort of restrictive legislation had to be done away with. And it was.' But despite that victory, she says the same systemic injustices remain today. 'We were working hard to ensure that their health was looked over,' she said. 'But they were being sent back into the same environment, which had not changed.'
She described a system still failing to meet the needs of First Nations people - fragmented, underfunded, and not up to scratch. 'It's still piecemeal. It's a bit here and a bit there,' she said. Flower was also a founding member of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, alongside Mum Shirl, Gordon Briscoe and others.
The clinic opened in the evenings, and she recalled those early nights when no one came. 'They'd poke their heads in the door, and we explained what we... Mum Shirl rounded up some people, mainly family... gradually people came. We had families and uh, and so on it went.' The service became a culturally safe haven — especially for people who had been rejected or mistreated elsewhere, including members of the queer community. 'I'll never forget the first lot of young men who decided they were going to change over to being female,' she said. 'There was nowhere else for them to go... but they were very welcome. They were made to be part of the family... Nobody judged them there. And they'd come and be treated in exactly the same way as other people.' She also played a key role in mentoring and training Aboriginal nurses and health workers, helping to build an Indigenous health workforce where none had existed. Now in her 80s, Auntie Dulcie says the future is still full of possibility — if the work continues. 'We're in a time of change,' she said. 'We'll lose a few battles, but we'll win too.' Living Black airs Mondays at 8.30pm on NITV, replays on Tuesday 10.35pm on SBS and is available on SBS On Demand.
Interviews and feature reports from NITV. A mob-made podcast about all things Blak life.
The Point: Referendum Road Trip Live weekly on Tuesday at 7.30pm Join Narelda Jacobs and John Paul Janke to get unique Indigenous perspectives and cutting-edge analysis on the road to the referendum. Watch now
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Soccer heading can alter brain chemistry, new research shows
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"We also found that two blood biomarkers, which have previously been associated with head trauma and dementia, were elevated following the heading task," Dr McCartney said. The blood samples showed elevated levels of two proteins, GFAP and NFL. Elevated levels of these two proteins are also seen in cases of concussion and dementia, albeit at much higher levels than were seen in the study's participants. These proteins are currently considered some of the best available blood biomarkers of brain injury and future dementia risk. But Dr McCartney was quick to point out that the players in the study didn't suffer any cognitive effects. "It tells us that they (the effects) are subtle," she said. "It tells us that we need to do further work to really understand the clinical and long-term significance of these effects." Dr Nathan Delang, who led the research as a PhD candidate and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Queensland, said more studies were being done to understand the patterns. "Elevated levels of these biomarkers indicate brain cells have been disturbed at a microstructural level," Dr Delang said. "The clinical and long-term significance of such small elevations is still being studied, particularly in relation to how much, and what pattern, of exposure might lead to effects on brain structure and function." But Dr McCartney said determining the long-term impact of soccer heading was difficult because it was virtually impossible to sort out the effects of sub-concussive knocks — like heading a soccer ball — from more severe head knocks. "Often people who are experiencing a lot of non-concussive impacts are also experiencing concussive impacts, and so, it makes it hard to do these observational studies," she said. 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ABC News
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Eligible medical school candidates turned away in their thousands each year
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ABC News
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The controversial and very male history of naming body parts
Take a look at your body. All the parts you can see, as well as all those on the inside, have been given a name at some point in history. There are plenty of descriptive, fairly innocuous names. But many parts are named after people. The vast majority of these are men, whose identities are invisibly stamped on every human. This includes female body parts — even the G in G spot pays tribute to a man. "There are hundreds and hundreds of dead old white men living inside us," Adam Taor, author of Bodypedia: A Brief Compendium of Human Anatomical Curiosities, tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live. But some doctors believe these names need to be retired, with more anatomically descriptive terms used instead. "The world has changed," says Nisha Khot, the president-elect of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. "So I think it's time to change the language that we use." Humans began carving up cadavers and taking a look at what's inside in ancient times. And the basic rule for generations of researchers was "name what you see". A leg bone looked like a flute, so it was given the Latin word for the musical instrument, the 'tibia'. Then there's the patella or the kneecap, which means 'little pan' in Latin. A less creative example is an unusually shaped bone in our pelvis called the innominate, which is Latin for 'unnamed'. That's because it doesn't look like anything else. Dr Taor describes the process as "like Pictionary but with a lot more blood on the floor". But as time went on, naming conventions became less descriptive and more personal. "Often body parts were named after people who discovered them … or doctors who were good at putting their name forward so that they got their name attached to bits of the body," Dr Taor says. As Dr Khot sums up: "It was a way of making sure that their memory stayed alive." Over more recent centuries, there were leaps and bounds in European anatomical study. And this was very much a boy's club. "It was men who did all of the study of the human body … Women rarely got a look in," Dr Khot says. "So that's the reason most body parts were named after men." One review looked at 700 body parts that were eponyms, or named after people. There were 432 people's names around the body (as some names are connected to multiple parts). Of these, 424 were men. The rest consisted of five gods, a king, a hero and just one woman. Raissa Nitabuch was a little-known 19th century Russian pathologist who studied the placenta. The Nitabuch layer — a layer between the uterus and the placenta — is named after her. But, as Dr Khot points out, it's not exactly a major body part: "You can only see it if you look under a microscope." The study also found the average year of eponymous term attribution was 1847, meaning much of our body reflects the medical world of the mid-19th century. Even when it comes to a woman's reproductive parts, "dead men dominate living women", according to Dr Taor. Take the fallopian tubes. They're named after 16th-century Italian priest-turned-anatomist Gabriele Falloppio (who is also the eponym for the fallopian canal and fallopian hiatus). Once you start looking, there are male names all around the female pelvis. From the pouch of Douglas (a Scottish surgeon) to Skene's glands (a Scottish gynaecologist) and Bartholin's glands (a Danish anatomist). The G in G spot is named after German-born gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg. "I really can't see why we should use those names for [parts] that are very specific to women … It makes me feel uncomfortable," Dr Khot says. The pudendal nerves, which take sensations from male and female genitalia to the brain, is a less gendered term but still reflects a cultural bias. It comes from the Latin word 'pudere', meaning to be ashamed. "I think that says something about the attitude of the male doctors who name these things. No wonder that people feel shame about their genitals … when it's hardwired into us," Dr Taor says. Pudendum has also been a term for genitalia — especially women's. But due to this connection with shame, its use has been curbed. The domination of dead men's names for body parts isn't the only issue; some of them have problematic backgrounds and connections. For example, within your heart is a collection of muscle cells called the bundle of His, named after the Swiss-born anatomist Wilhelm His Jr who discovered it in 1893. And according to Dr Taor: "Every beat of your heart is a memorial to a prominent pre-World War II Berlin doctor who helped legitimise Nazi atrocities." His became the rector of the University of Berlin in the 1920s and was a prominent advocate of eugenics, a pseudoscience involving "cleansing" the gene pool to create a genetically superior race. The Nazis later used eugenics — what they called 'rassenhygiene' or racial hygiene — to justify forced sterilisations, murder and genocide. Then there's John Hunter. He was a superstar Scottish surgeon-anatomist in the 18th century. Hunter's canal in our thigh carries his name. Dr Taor calls Hunter "the father of scientific surgery … one of the most influential surgeons who ever lived". But Hunter was also a keen collector of oddities and a bit "creepy", Dr Taor explains. He infamously stole the body of Charles Byrne, known as the "Irish Giant" for standing 2.31 metres tall, and put him on display. This was very much against Byrne's wishes before he died. Most eponymous anatomical terms also have more technical names. For example, Hunter's canal is also the adductor canal. There has been a shift towards using these terms, but in many cases, the Falloppio and Douglas varieties still dominate medical, and therefore cultural, vernacular. Dr Khot wants a more concerted effort of change, particularly for women's body parts and also if the man in question is a "troubling" figure. "The description of using somebody's name doesn't tell you what the body part is … My view is that we should call things what they are anatomically," she says. As one example, Dr Khot advocates the use of uterine tubes rather than fallopian tubes. And she says similar changes have been made elsewhere in this space, like for various medical conditions that affect women. She points to Stein-Leventhal syndrome, originally named after American gynaecologists Irving Stein and Michael Leventhal, which is now called polycystic ovarian syndrome, also known as PCOS. "I'm not saying we should erase history … The majority of these men did good things. They described anatomy, which has helped us grow science and grow healthcare," Dr Khot says. "But we have more women studying [medicine] and more women doctors … So I think it's time to change the language that we have used."
