Then and now

A letter-writer rails against “poisonous vaccines and drugs” and the vast medical establishment pushing them on the population, leaving the country “littered and plastered from end to end and side to side with mad, maimed, diseased and prematurely dead”.

- Russell Brown

The sentiment might read like a Big Pharma day on the Facebook page of a difficult relative but it is, in fact, a letter to the editor of the New Zealand Listener - in 1956. The author is Ulric Williams, the Whanganui doctor-turned-naturopath who was a national figure at the time. Williams further held in his missive that pre-contact Māori had enjoyed healthy lives with “practically no disease”, until they were ruined by the doctors. (The more conventional view is that the Māori population was laid waste by the arrival of the colonists’ diseases - influenza, smallpox and typhoid - and halved between 1840 and 1890.)

I discovered Dr Williams’ letter by accident in searching the archives of the first 20 years of the