ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the common themes through an examination of the configurations of race, disease and power in New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Buck's argument indicates how conceptions of the relationship between race and disease could have profound significance for public health practice. New Zealand's founding myths have been dependent upon a narrative of supposedly favourable race relations between Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants, known as Maori from the mid-nineteenth century. Explanations for Maori susceptibility to disease reveal the mutually constitutive nature of concepts of race and disease. Despite an initially optimistic outlook regarding Maori health reform, public health officials demonstrated increasing frustration and impatience towards Maori by the second decade of the twentieth century. The intersection of racial discourses and bacteriological ideas was particularly apparent in discussion of Maori typhoid carriers. Officials and observers usually blamed typhoid outbreaks on Maori unwillingness to adhere to basic standards of hygiene and sanitation.
