Dr. William Theodore Hodge: pioneer surgeon-apothecary in early-twentieth-century Western Australia.
In 2008 I chanced upon the lonely grave of Dr. William Theodore Hodge, buried in 1934, in the Derby Pioneer and Aboriginal Cemetery. He turned out to be the founding doctor of the practice in which I have worked for the past thirty years. Dr. Hodge migrated from England in 1896. He was the first western trained doctor to work in the Perth suburb of Claremont and in the wheat-belt town of Kellerberrin. He was an innovative and inventive modern doctor who became a legend in the Kimberley where he died tragically, on the day prior to his retirement, at the age of seventy-five. His story is illustrative of the life and medical practice of a pioneering doctor in metropolitan, rural, and remote practice in Western Australia at the end of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth centuries.
Kamien
Max
M
University of Western Australia.
D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D019035:Rural Health Services / Q000266:history*; D014904:Western Australia