Cirrus@Austlit

Edwin Doudney was a surgeon and medical practitioner who lived in Australia at intervals between 1872 - ca.1910. In his youth he had been gripped by a spirit of adventure, and at one point interrupted his medical training to travel to America to join the Confederate side in the American Civil War. On returning to England he then briefly joined a cavalry regiment, before eventually resuming his studies. Doudney initially visited Queensland in 1867, as medical officer aboard the immigrant ship Young Australia. Upon qualifying as a M.R.C.S. in 1870, he then made a further two trips to Australia as a medical officer aboard immigrant ships, before settling at at the Queensland gold-rush town of Gympie in ca. 1872. From there he moved on to Cooktown, from where he visited the Palmer River diggings. In ca. 1875 he left Queensland for New South Wales and then lived at Newcastle for a number of years. He appears to have returned to England at one stage (he is listed in the British 1881 census), but by the 1890s he was practicing medicine in Sydney, and during the first decade of the twentieth century, he practiced at Port Macquarie. During World War 1 he served as a medical officer on British merchant ships, and afterwards continued to work in English hospitals into the 1920s.