![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The existence of the medical tultul of Papua New Guinea is traced from inception during the German colonial period in 1903, as one part in a system of local village officials, until displacement in the 1960s. Prevalence was closely related to Papua New Guinea development and changes due to the world situation, including the First World War and the Second World War. A significant role in affecting Western acculturation and promoting Western medicine is reported.
Acknowledgments
Grateful appreciation is expressed to a number of members of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) for their support of this project, and to the Journal of Pacific History Narratives and Documents Committee for helping to further develop this study of a unique historical subject.
Notes
1 E. Massal and A. Scherzer, ‘Pacific Islanders Study Health Education by Group Methods’, SPC Quarterly Bulletin (Oct. 1957): 55–7.
2 Cathy Lepi Pilang, Marion Gray, and Florin Oprescu, ‘The Evolution of the Community Health Worker in Papua New Guinea’, Rural and Remote Health 17, no. 4 (2017): 3961.
3 S.S. Mackenzie, The Australians at Rabaul: The Capture and Administration of the German Possessions in the Southern Pacific (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1927), 220–2; Stewart Firth, New Guinea under the Germans (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), 64.
4 Marjorie Jacobs, ‘German New Guinea’, in Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, ed. Peter Ryan (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press and University of Papua and New Guinea, 1972), 488. Hahl was transferred to the Carolines (1899). The first governor, Rudolf von Benningsen, continued appointments of luluais to the Gazelle Peninsula and Duke of York Group. Hahl was appointed acting governor in 1901 but went on medical leave until 1903 (485). For Hahl’s concept of the medical tultul as medical assistant under the luluai and tultul, see R.F.R. Scragg, ‘Medical tul-tul to Doctor of Medicine’, in A History of Medicine in Papua New Guinea: Vignettes of an Earlier Period, ed. Burton B. Burton-Bradley (Kingsgrove, NSW: Australasian Medical Publishing Co., 1990), 16. Stephen Winsor Reed asserts that the medical tultul, ‘was concerned solely with health of the villagers, and was therefore not a part of the control system’, The Making of Modern New Guinea: with Special Reference to Culture Contact in the Mandated Territory (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1943), 139.
5 L.P. Mair, Australia in New Guinea (London: Christophers, 1948), 181.
6 Scragg, ‘Medical tul-tul to Doctor of Medicine’, 16.
7 Reed, The Making of Modern New Guinea, 210–11.
8 Ibid., 140.
9 Ibid., 140–1.
10 Peter J. Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978), 135; Reed, The Making of Modern New Guinea, 139–40.
11 Reed, The Making of Modern New Guinea, 139, fn. 41. Reed notes that, ‘Kukurai, the word for “chief” in the languages of North Bougainville, is sometimes heard in place of luluai. In Melanesian pidgin they are synonymous.’
12 C.D. Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958), 215.
13 William J.D. Mira, From Cowrie to Kina: The Coinages, Currencies, Badges, Medals, Awards and Decorations of Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Spink & Son, 1986), 162, from an English translation of Hahl’s report, ‘Über die Rechtsanschauungen der Eingeborenen eines Theiles der Blanchebucht und des Innern der Gazelle Halbinsel’, Nachrichten über Kaiser Wilhelmsland und den Bismarck-Archipel 13, June 1897, 68–85, https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/kolonialbibliothek/periodical/titleinfo/7792148 (accessed 4 Jan. 2024).
14 Rowley, Australians in German New Guinea, 216.
15 For hat description, see also Brian Essai, Papua and New Guinea. A Contemporary Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 37. In areas of conflict, placement of the luluai hat confirmed government authority, see Robin Radford, Highlanders and Foreigners in the Upper Ramu: The Kainantu area 1919–1942 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 123.
16 Mira, From Cowrie to Kina, 170.
17 Rowley, Australians in German New Guinea, 222–3. See also Mair, Australia in New Guinea, 55–6. The first paramount luluai was appointed in 1936 in the Highlands, see Radford, Highlanders and Foreigners, 121.
18 Ibid., 185.
19 Reed, Making of Modern New Guinea, 140, fn. 45; for hat description see also Essai, Papua and New Guinea, 37.
20 Mair, Australia in New Guinea, 55; Stewart MacPherson, ‘The Development of Basic Health Services in Papua New Guinea, with Particular Reference to Southern Highlands Province’ (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 1980), 182–3; Scragg, ‘Medical tul-tul to Doctor of Medicine’, 16–17; for hat description see also Essai, Papua and New Guinea, 38.
21 Wolfgang U. Eckart, ‘Medicine and German Colonial Expansion in the Pacific: The Caroline, Mariana and Marshall Islands’, in Diseases, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Routledge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1988), 86. Compare the New Guinea medical tultuls, who were local village health officials trained from 1903, with the travelling native medical assistants in Papua who were trained from 1931, at first in-service, then in 1933 at the Sydney School of Tropical Medicine and Public Health and subsequently at Divinakoiari in the Northern Division of Papua. Scragg, ‘Medical tul-tul to Doctor of Medicine’, 18–20, and Donald Denoon, Public Health in Papua New Guinea: Medical Possibility and Social Constraint, 1884–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53–4.
22 Margrit Davies, Public Health and Colonialism: The Case of German New Guinea 1884–1914 (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verly, 2002), 127–9, 162. Compare Charles Rowley's comment, ‘The medical tul-tuls were paid an annual salary of twenty marks, in itself an indication of the anxiety of the Government that the system should work effectively’. Rowley, ‘The Promotion of Native Health in German New Guinea’, South Pacific 9, no. 5 (1957): 393.
23 Davies, Public Health and Colonialism, 127–30.
24 MacPherson, ‘The Development of Basic Health Services’, 185.
25 Herman Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 71.
26 Ibid., 70.
27 Royal Commission on Late German New Guinea, Hubert Murray, Atllee Hunt, and Walter Lucas, Interim and Final Reports of the Royal Commission of late German New Guinea (Melbourne: Government printer, 1920), 32.
28 Rowley, ‘Promotion of Native Health’, 396.
29 Anthony J. Radford and Albert Speer, ‘Medical Tultuls and Aid Post Orderlies: Some Historical Notes on the Use of Village Health Workers on Papua New Guinea up to Independence’, Papua New Guinea Medical Journal 29, no. 2 (1986): 172.
30 Royal Commission on Late German New Guinea, 32; Radford and Speer, ‘Medical Tultuls’.
31 Mair, Australia in New Guinea, 181.
32 Radford and Speer, ‘Medical Tultuls’, 172; Scragg, ‘Medical tul-tul to Doctor of Medicine’, 25.
33 Radford and Speer, ‘Medical Tultuls’, 172.
34 Brian Essai, Papua New Guinea, 38, 206.
35 Radford and Speer, ‘Medical Tultuls’, 180.
36 Papua New Guinea House of Assembly, House of Assembly Debates Second House, 2, no. 17 (23 Sept. 1971), 4826.
37 MacPherson, ‘Development of Basic Health Services’, 188.
38 Hiery, Neglected War, 233.
39 Mair, Australia in New Guinea, 55.
40 Rowley, ‘Promotion of Native Health’, 397.
41 Mair, Australia in New Guinea, 55.
42 E.J. Watson, ‘The Village Medicine Man and the Health Worker’, Papua New Guinea Medical Journal 11, no. 4 (1968): 130.
43 Prime Minister’s Department, Official Handbook of the Territory of New Guinea Administered by the Commonwealth of Australia under Mandate from the Council of the League of Nations (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937), 285. Donald Denoon expressed the widespread positive view of many authoritative authors in the field that, ‘The innovation of the heil tultuls was one of very few German ideas to survive the transition to Australian rule’ (Public Health in Papua New Guinea, 53), and Charles Rowley reported that former Governor Hahl emphasized the efforts in the field of health when, in 1936, he defended the administration of German New Guinea (in his Deutsch Neu Guinea). Rowley observed that at least the German government had a plan of attack based in part on the heil tultul system (‘Promotion of Native Health’, 393–4).
44 Reed, Making of Modern New Guinea, 260.
45 House of Assembly Debates, 4826.