Guide to the Papers of Cecil Hackett, 1850-1997

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Summary

Collection number:
MS 9580
Creator:
Hackett, Cecil, 1905-1995
Extent:
4 metres and (20 boxes + 3 folios)
Language:
English
Preferred citation:
Items from this collection should be cited as '[Title or description of manuscript item], Papers of Cecil Hackett, National Library of Australia, MS 9580, [series and file number]'.
Availability:
Available
Access conditions:
Available for reference. Not for loan.

Background

Content Summary:

The collection comprises correspondence, diaries, notebooks, journal articles, newscuttings, reports, reprints, photographs, glass negatives, lantern slides and x-rays.

They document Hackett's career as a doctor, anthropologist and medical researcher. While there is a small amount of material relating to his anthropological studies among the Aborigines in Central Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, the bulk of his papers relate to his medical research on yaws and other tropical diseases in Africa and South East Asia. As a result of his research, he became an acknowledged world expert in this field. Hackett was a prolific writer and the papers contain copies of a large number of his journal articles.

Correspondents include T. Draper Campbell, Sir John Cleland, Robert Edwards, Frank Fenner, H. H. Finlayson, R. W. Hornabrook, Ivan Magary, Charles Mountford, Cyril Mudford, Ted Steinbock, Norman Tindale, David Ungar and various staff from the World Health Organisation, the South Australian Museum and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).

Biographical Note:

Cecil John Hackett was born in Norwood, South Australia on 25 April 1905. He attended St. Peter's College and Queen's School, Adelaide and then went on to study medicine at Adelaide University (1922-1927).

In 1927 he was a member of the University's first anthropological trip to Central Australia. It was on this trip that he first met an Aboriginal woman with grossly bent legs and arms known as 'boomerang leg'. Hackett graduated in medicine from Adelaide University in 1927. After spending a year at the Adelaide General Hospital he travelled to London and studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1929-30.

After a brief period with the Colonial Service, in Shanghai in 1932, he returned to Adelaide due to ill-health. In 1933 he was invited to accompany Norman Tindale, an anthropologist from the South Australian Museum, on a two month expedition to the Mann and Musgrave Ranges in Central Australia where they documented the movements and social structure of the Pitjantjatjara people. During this trip Hackett again saw a child with some scabs and 'boomerang leg' and he began his quest to find out the cause of the deformity.

In 1934 he received a grant from the Sheridan Research Fund of the Adelaide University and set off again to Central Australia. At this time he thought that yaws, a contagious skin disease, was the cause of the deformity but through his research he was able to prove that it was a non-venereal treponomal infection. In 1936 he was awarded a Doctor of Medicine for his investigations of 'boomerang leg'.

Returning to England in 1935 Hackett worked in the Anatomy Department of Cambridge University. In 1937 he received a Senior Research Fellowship from the British Medical Research Council Fellowship to study tropical medicine. He set off for Lango in Uganda to study the incidence of yaws and syphilis. Hackett completed his research in 1940 and received a doctorate. However, his major work on this subject, Bone lesions of yaws in Uganda, was not published until 1951.

In 1940 Hackett joined the RAF, serving principally in malaria prevention programs in Sierra Leone, India and Burma. At the end of the war, he returned to London and became the Director of the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science where he played a major role in building up the Institution to be a major centre for research in tropical medicine.

In 1954 he was invited to join the World Health Organisation in Geneva where he became a Medical Officer in the Venereal Diseases and Treponematoses Section. His main area of work was to implement programs to control yaws with penicillin.

On his retirement in 1965, Hackett returned to London and continued his studies of treponemal diseases, becoming an acknowledged world expert. He also became interested in the diagnosis of disease by studying dated human remains. He produced some 90 published scientific papers, as well as about 30 unpublished reports on yaws, medical museums and physical anthropology.

Cecil Hackett died in England in April 1995.

Hackett also wrote many journal articles, reports and papers. There are too many to list here. A detailed listing of his works up to 1983 can be found in a curriculum vitae in Series 3, File 9.

Provenance:

The collection was donated to the Library by Mrs Beatrice Hackett in two instalments in 1997 and 1998.

Arrangement:

The two instalments have been amalgamated and arranged into 11 series. On arrival, the papers were disordered and they have been sorted into series by Library staff.

Container List:
Series File/Piece Box
1 1-6 1
1 7-13 2
2 1-5 2
2 6-17 3
2 18-28 4
3 1-4 4
3 5-11 5
4 1-2 5
4 3-10 6
5 1-7 7
5 8-11 8
6 1-2 8
6 3-10 9
6 11-12 10
7 1-4 10
7 5-11 11
8 1 11
8 2-10 12
9 Printed material 13
9 Printed material 14
10 1-3 15
10 4-11 16
10 12-15 17
10 16-23 18
10 24-27 19
11 Photographic material 20
11 Photographic material 21
11 Photographic material 22
11 Photographic material 23

Access and use

Conditions Governing Access:
The collection is available for reference.
Conditions Governing Use:
Copying and publishing of unpublished manuscript material is subject to copyright restrictions. For such material, written permission to publish must be obtained from the copyright holder(s). Copying of unpublished material for research purposes is permissible 50 years after the death of the creator of the material.
Preferred citation:
Items from this collection should be cited as '[Title or description of manuscript item], Papers of Cecil Hackett, National Library of Australia, MS 9580, [series and file number]'.
Location of this collection:
Parkes Place
Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
Contact:
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