 opening the forum this morning the VC pointed out the importance of events like this to foster collaboration across multiple sites and across traditional boundaries. I would like to suggest that those of us working in the humanities and in history in particular have a lot to offer scientific and medical researchers, specifically providing the relevant social and cultural context important in understanding the big issues. As a doctoral student in the 1980s, I entered a new and exciting discipline called the Social History Medicine, which self-consciously sought to position medicine within the society from which it came, as opposed to the antiquarian and celebratory accounts of medical history that had dominated the field to that point. My first major work was a social history of tuberculosis in 20th century Britain with a strong patient focus, you can see the patient on the cover there, concerned with understanding the social reality behind the romanticised view of this particular disease that was exemplified in Pat's Thomas Mann's novel called The Magic Mountain. 20th century Western medicine has sometimes been portrayed as mechanistic or biomedical, but I found the medical responses to this particular infectious disease markedly holistic with a good dose of patient blaming and exhortations to self-control and moderation in all things. This was used in preventive campaigns as well as in treatment itself. My career in the social history of medicine led me down many avenues including paediatrics and the iconic Plunkett Society set up here in New Zealand in 1907 and also into maternal health. The latter led to a milestone application just over a decade ago for a project on reproductive health history with a special emphasis on New Zealand's foremost hospital in this area, National Women's Hospital. It was this project for which I was granted one of the inaugural University Research Awards in 1914 that Diane mentioned. This project gained me some notoriety. As in the course of my research I came to question the conclusions of inquiry into the hospital that had taken place in 1988, the so-called Cartwright Inquiry after Judge Sylvia Cartwright subsequently Governor-General. The Vice-Chancellor's citation for my research award in 2014 focused specifically on this work and public engagement and how it had, as Diane said, changed understandings of our medical history. And as an indication of its reception in the scientific community, he cited one review from Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Hematology, Robin Carroll, who wrote of the book, I quote, it is a chilling and gripping account. Read it. Although the story relates to a crisis in New Zealand, it bears a grim message for all who endeavour to advance medical science. Well, what was that message? As a historian, I do not seek to be didactic, nor am I an apologist for the doctors of that hospital as I've sometimes been accused. Rather, I sought to position the Cartwright Inquiry into its historical context. We learned from medical history that there is no one doctor's point of view that treatment methods are constantly in flux and negotiated, and the treatment of carcinoma and situ, the subject of the inquiry, was no exception. The 1980s was also a particular point in time when consumerism was on the ascendant, and social relations in medicine were in some quarters acrimonious. It was this constellation of factors, an intersection of different interest groups inside and outside of medicine that brought about this inquiry and gave it the huge public profile it had. The inquiry report itself has become an iconic text in certain sectors of society, and my dispassionate treatment of it as a historical document was not well received by those who idolised it. In an interview with Kim Hull to many public addresses, this book really touched a nerve, ignited by a cover story in the listener at the time of publication called At Last the Truth, a title, by the way, which I did not choose. The book also sparked an extended correspondence in the New Zealand Medical Journal, which included no less than 43 items over the course of several months, and I was invited to write an extended guest editorial. In my second book, Emerging from the Marsden Grant, which was the story of the hospital more generally, I also analysed power struggles between different groups. Again, doctors should not be seen as a homogenous group, but these power struggles and negotiations that influenced medicine and the hospital also included consumers, nurses, midwives and the government. So this book covered not only changing issues in childbirth practices, but also in fertility services as well as contraception, sterilisation and abortion. It also investigated the rise of neonatal and maternal fetal medicine, and ironically by the end of the century when there was ever more medical specialisation and advanced technology, midwives became the primary caregivers in childbirth. I investigated how this situation arose, helping I hope to understand the present situation. What was most gratifying to me through my career is that I have succeeded in reaching out beyond the disciplinary boundaries of history to a wider public, and the popular media reviews of my book attest to the success impact, I think we call it. A reviewer in the press wrote of my History of National Women's Hospital, I quote, I'm really effusive in a review, but here I strongly recommend the price of this book as minuscule in contrast to the knowledge to be gained by anyone, even peripherically concerned with medicine in general and women's health in particular. Well, that doesn't do much for the royalties, but the reviewer did go on to say that this text would justifiably remain a medical and social classic for many years to come. So my message then to you is that medicine only exists in its social and cultural context, something which is not always appreciated, and as a little footnote I just want to add to the cocktail story, and that is that when I was at the point of thinking about new directions in my medical history research, I attended a university cocktail party and happened to be talking to Professor Andrew Shelling of the medical faculty who said to me, you know, someone should really take a close look at national women's, and so Professor Shelling has a lot to answer for. Thank you.