About Health and History

Health and History

Health and History, also styled Health & History, is the peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine (ANZSHM). It carries the print ISSN 1442-1771 and the electronic ISSN 1839-3314, the two identifiers recorded on this Journals World record, and it publishes original research on the history of health, illness, medicine and healing, with a particular — though not exclusive — emphasis on Australia, New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. If you work on how past societies understood bodies, disease, care and cure, this is one of the specialist venues where that conversation is centred in the Southern Hemisphere. This profile explains what the journal publishes, who publishes it, how its society setting shapes its contents, how to read and use its articles, what to check before citing or submitting work to it, and how it differs from medical journals that publish history only as an occasional supplement.

At a glance

The table above deliberately separates confirmed identifiers from information that changes or that is held elsewhere. Journal web pages move, editorial teams rotate and subscription arrangements are revised, so a careful reader should always confirm operational details — current editors, submission addresses and access terms — on the society's own site at the moment of use, rather than relying on any directory entry, including this one.

The society behind the journal

Understanding Health and History starts with understanding ANZSHM. The society states that it was founded in 1986 and is incorporated in Victoria, Australia. Its stated aim is to promote the academic study of the history of health sciences within the Australian, New Zealand and wider Pacific region. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in the history of health and illness, and the society describes its members as a mixture of amateur and professional historians and clinicians with an interest in the history of their own disciplines, alongside readers with a general interest in health practice through the centuries. That mixture matters for the journal. A society journal owned by a mixed membership tends to value work that is scholarly in method but legible beyond a narrow specialism — archival research that a practising nurse, pharmacist, dentist or physician with historical curiosity can follow, as well as theoretically informed history written for academic historians.

The society situates the journal among a wider set of activities. It publishes a quarterly newsletter, holds a major conference every two years — its 2025 conference was held in Sydney — and awards a biennial prize for the best book written on the history of health and medicine in Australia, New Zealand and the wider Oceania region. The journal therefore does not float alone. Articles in Health and History often speak to a community that also meets in person, argues in newsletters, and rewards book-length work in the same field. For a new researcher, that community dimension is practical information: submitting to the journal is also a way of entering a regional scholarly conversation, and reading the journal over several issues is a good way to learn what that conversation currently cares about.

The society's terms of reference, in its own summary, cover the sharing of all aspects of the history of health — explicitly including the professions of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacology — and health themes within history itself. Although the emphasis falls on medicine and health in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, members also pursue interests in European, Middle Eastern and classical medicine and in other regions. A prospective author should read that breadth literally: a study set outside Australasia is not automatically out of scope, but it will be read by an audience whose centre of gravity is the region, and the strongest submissions usually make clear why their material speaks to readers of this journal in particular.

Scope: what the journal publishes

The journal's scope is the history of health and medicine in the fullest sense: not only the history of doctors and discoveries, but the history of patients, institutions, professions, public health campaigns, epidemics, healing practices and ideas about the body. The subject labels attached to this Journals World record — history of science and medicine, medical history, history of medicine and tropical health, historical psychiatry and medical practices, and historical studies — are a reasonable map of the territory, provided they are read as overlapping zones rather than sealed compartments.

Several recurring zones can be identified. First, there is institutional and professional history: hospitals, asylums, medical schools, nursing training, pharmacies, professional associations and registration systems, and the way those institutions shaped who could practise, who was treated and on what terms. Second, there is the history of disease and public health: epidemic responses, quarantine, vaccination campaigns, sanitation, occupational health and the long campaigns against particular conditions in Australian and Pacific settings. Third, there is social and cultural history: how ordinary people experienced illness, sought care, used domestic and commercial remedies, and understood concepts such as contagion, heredity, mental illness or healthy living in particular periods. Fourth, there is biographical and intellectual history: the lives of practitioners and researchers, the circulation of medical ideas between Europe, Asia, the Pacific and Australasia, and the translation of those ideas into local practice. Fifth, there is the history of health in colonial and postcolonial settings, including the medical dimensions of settlement, the health of Indigenous peoples as documented — and often distorted — by colonial records, and the role of missions, military medicine and tropical medicine in the Pacific.

That last zone deserves emphasis because it shapes method. A journal centred on Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific sits on archives created by settler states, missions, armed forces and medical services. Good work in this journal's tradition reads those archives critically, asks whose voices they preserve and whose they silence, and where possible sets them alongside oral history, material culture, family records and Indigenous scholarship. Readers evaluating an article should look for that critical awareness; authors preparing one should build it in from the start rather than adding it as a closing gesture.

How the journal is organised and read

Health and History appears twice a year. Two issues a year is a deliberate pace for a society journal in a specialised field: it allows thematic coherence within an issue, careful editing, and a review process that draws on a relatively small pool of expert readers who genuinely know the archives and historiography involved. The society describes the journal plainly as a peer-reviewed publication of original papers and research, and authors should assume that standard scholarly peer review applies — that claims will be checked by readers who know the field, that archival references will be expected to be precise, and that engagement with existing historiography is not optional decoration but part of the argument.

For readers, the journal's value is cumulative. A single article may reconstruct one hospital's admission patterns, one epidemic's local course or one profession's campaign for recognition. Read across issues, those studies build a regional history of health that no single monograph could supply: how health systems in Australia and New Zealand were assembled, how Pacific health was governed and contested, and how ideas about race, gender, class and environment ran through medical practice. Libraries hold the journal in print under ISSN 1442-1771 and in electronic form under ISSN 1839-3314, and researchers searching catalogues should try both identifiers plus the ampersand form of the title, Health & History, since cataloguing practice varies between systems.

A note on access is important. The journal has not been presented in the sources consulted as a fully open-access title, and directory summaries describe it as operating without an open-access model for its main content. Individual readers may therefore encounter subscription or membership routes, library holdings, or selected material made openly visible by the society. Where a specific article is needed, the reliable routes are a university or state library catalogue, the society itself, or an interlibrary request quoting the ISSN and the article's volume and issue. Claims elsewhere on the web about immediate free access to the full archive should be treated with caution and checked against the society's own pages.

Reading the journal critically: metrics and standing

Specialist history journals are poorly served by headline metrics, and Health and History is a good example of why. Citation counts in the history of medicine accumulate slowly, books matter as much as articles, and a journal's real standing is carried by the scholars who publish in it, the conferences and prizes around it, and the extent to which later work must engage with what it printed. Figures attached to directory records — including counts of indexed works and citations — are snapshots produced by particular databases at particular dates, and different databases index different slices of the journal's run. Coverage in large commercial indexes has changed over time for many small society journals, and a change in indexing coverage is a fact about a database's list, not a verdict on the quality of the scholarship.

Researchers who need a defensible statement about the journal's standing should assemble it from primary evidence: the society that owns it, the scholars on its editorial team as listed in a current issue, the libraries that hold it, the reviews and citations its articles receive in books and journals in the field, and its continuous publication record under stable ISSNs. That kind of evidence ages better than any single number, and it is the kind of evidence assessment panels in the humanities actually recognise. If a tenure, promotion or grant document asks for a journal quality indicator, quote the specific database and year you used and note that humanities panels commonly accept contextual evidence alongside it.

For authors: preparing a submission

Authors considering Health and History should begin with fit, not with formatting. Ask three questions. Does the manuscript make an original contribution to the history of health or medicine, rather than retelling a familiar chronology? Does it rest on primary evidence — archival, published primary, oral, visual or material — handled with explicit method? And does it speak, even if its setting is elsewhere, to the regional and thematic conversation this journal hosts? A manuscript that answers yes to all three is a plausible candidate; one that answers no to the first is not ready for any serious history journal.

Practical preparation follows from the journal's character. Write for the mixed scholarly readership described above: define specialist terms, identify institutions and places that readers outside one country may not know, and give dates and context for legislation, epidemics and organisations rather than assuming local knowledge. Engage the historiography published in this journal itself — editors and reviewers notice quickly when a submission ignores the venue's own prior contributions on its topic. Handle human material ethically: patient records, asylum and hospital files, and records relating to Indigenous communities raise real questions about privacy, cultural sensitivity and archival permission, and a good submission states how those questions were addressed. Where photographs, casebooks or ephemera are reproduced, confirm reproduction rights with the holding archive before submission, not after acceptance.

Because editorial personnel and submission mechanics change, this profile does not print an editor's name, a postal address or a fee figure: none was confirmed from a current journal page in the sources consulted, and printing stale details would mislead. The correct procedure is to take the current instructions from the society's website or the masthead of the most recent issue, follow them exactly, and keep a copy of the version you submitted. If the journal's instructions and a third-party directory disagree, the journal's own instructions govern.

How this journal differs from neighbouring titles

Readers new to the field sometimes confuse society history-of-medicine journals with three neighbouring kinds of publication. The first is the general medical journal, which may print an occasional historical essay but judges submissions by clinical relevance; Health and History judges by historical method and contribution. The second is the general history journal, which welcomes health topics but expects them to speak to broad historical debates; Health and History's readers bring specialist knowledge, so technical medical and institutional detail can be developed more fully. The third is the national medical heritage or museum bulletin, which often privileges commemoration and local record over peer-reviewed argument. Health and History sits in the scholarly centre: commemorative and local material appears, but the journal's identity is that of a refereed research publication owned by a learned society with a regional remit and an international field.

Within Australia and New Zealand, the journal's distinctiveness is its combination of regional focus and disciplinary breadth across the health professions. Dentistry, nursing, pharmacy and allied fields have their own heritage literatures, often scattered; a journal whose society explicitly embraces all of them gives those histories a shared forum and lets comparison happen — between professions, between the two countries, and between metropolitan and Pacific settings.

Frequently asked questions

Is Health and History peer reviewed?

Yes. The publishing society describes it as a peer-reviewed publication of original papers and research, and authors should expect expert review appropriate to a specialist scholarly journal.

How often does it appear?

Twice a year. The society calls it its biannual journal, and directory records agree on a frequency of two issues per year.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 1442-1771 and electronic ISSN 1839-3314. Use the print ISSN for the paper edition and the electronic ISSN when citing or ordering the online edition.

Does it only publish Australian topics?

No, but its centre of gravity is Australia, New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Work set elsewhere should show why it belongs in this conversation, for example through comparative, imperial, missionary, military or migration connections, or through ideas and practitioners who moved between regions.

Is it open access?

The sources consulted do not present the journal's main content as fully open access. Expect library, subscription or society-membership routes for most material, and check the society's site for any openly posted items.

Who should read it?

Historians of medicine and health, clinicians and other health professionals interested in the history of their fields, archivists and museum workers in medical heritage, graduate students building a regional literature review, and policy readers who want the historical background to present-day health arrangements in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

A note on sources and verification

Every factual anchor in this profile — the society's founding year, its stated aim, the journal's frequency and peer-reviewed character, and the two ISSNs — was checked against the society's own published material or against the identifiers carried on this site's record. Where a detail could not be confirmed from such a source, for example a current article charge or a named editor for the present year, this profile says so openly rather than filling the gap with a plausible guess. That discipline is worth copying whenever you cite journal information in a grant application, a library catalogue or a curriculum vitae: prefer the publisher's or society's own page, record the date you checked it, and keep identifiers in their hyphenated form so that other researchers can trace exactly the same record.

Summary

Health and History (ISSN 1442-1771; e-ISSN 1839-3314) is the biannual, peer-reviewed journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine, founded in 1986. It publishes original research on the history of health, illness and the healing professions, centred on Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific and connected to the wider world. Its strengths are the strengths of a good society journal: a defined community, expert review, regional depth and room for the histories of all the health professions, not only medicine. Readers should verify current editorial and access details on the society's own pages, treat third-party metric snapshots with care, and judge the journal — as its own community does — by the quality and durability of the scholarship it has carried.