Africana Votes & Views #11
The ills that afflict the human condition must be an eternal subject of interest to most people. Just listen in when a bunch of ‘mature’ people get together – first up on the agenda are the aches and pains that are experienced, as well as the miracle - or other cures that have been found.
So we’ll have a look at medicine in the Dark Continent, as well as a few related matters. I’ve always thought of the personage who used to be known as the District Surgeon, as a romantic figure who drove a clapped-out Ford or Studebaker sedan over unspeakable tracks in the Bush, with a black orderly/assistant next to him, and a rifle handy on the back seat among the paraphernalia of his profession. This was the Bundu Doctor, and I met a number of these worthy gentlemen in the flesh during the mid 1950’s.
It was with great delight that I actually found a book with just that title only a month or two back, written by a pukka sahib, Colonel (Dr) J Whitby (R Hale, 1961) covering his experiences in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whence he had been posted after extensive duty in the Far East. I immersed myself in the book without further ado, expecting a bizarre array of cases, circumstances and humorous anecdotes. Despite the title, I was a little disappointed. Although the good doctor had a truly sympathetic touch with sufferers from a host of maladies, his writing is infused with racial stereotyping, generalisations ad nauseam, military and colonial attitudes and a fine disregard for the spelling of place-names. His chapter on witchcraft and the results on the affected tribespeople is of interest, and his description of setting a patient’s broken leg via radio instructions to a panicky wife, is an absolute howler, while one or two episodes described smack of being ‘bundu legends’.
The author spent time in his mobile surgery in the ‘doctor’s bogie’, a special wagon hitched onto the train that traversed the country from south to north. It would stop at every small station and the ailing populace would flock in for treatment, often necessitating the bogie’s being left behind in a siding to be hooked up by the next train. Altogether the book is a fair reflection of life in the colonies in the late 1940s, and it paints a good picture of the little settlement of Maun in the Okavango, as well as the Zambian Copperbelt.
Subsequently he was to enter the services of WNLA as the Medical Officer who checked out the avalanche of humanity absorbed by the Witwatersrand gold mines, only to be spat out when their contracts had expired. He devotes more than a whole chapter to the methods used by this organization, as well as the many benefits that the Africans enjoyed due to the system, which operated from a numbers of centres in the Caprivi, Barotseland, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique.
A medico of an entirely different calibre is Alberto Denti di Pirajno, who wrote two books: A Cure for Serpents (Andre Deutsch, 1955) and A Grave for a Dolphin (1956), on his experiences. The good doctor starts his first book with charming reminiscences
among the Berber and Tuareg people of Tripolitania. None of the dour medical details, but intimate cameos of a kaleidoscope of patients, interspersed with snippets of local folklore and flavours from the Arabian Nights. While his treatments might not always have had the full endorsement of the British Medical Association, his cure for impotence, to which the title of the book refers is certainly a novel one which smacks of the time-honoured sleight of hand used by quacks to extract demons or extraneous objects from the patients’ bodies. An endearing quality of Pirajno’s writing is the lack of judgmental pontificating – as he cheerfully treats prostitutes, beggars, villagers or pashas, acknowledging their common humanity.
His next appointment was in Eritrea, this time as Regional Commissioner, but he still had to deputise occasionally for the MO. A hunting trip into the inhospitable desert; a bevy of beautiful women weaving their intrigues; tribal feuds and hashish smuggling all feature in this eventful period at Massawa, before he was transferred to the capital of Asmara for a spell before WWII. The book ends on a sombre note as the good doctor had been posted to Tripoli as the city’s governor and he had to surrender it to Montgomery’s forces.
The second book is a strange tale of a foundling Venus, a love story, of dolphins and of magic – very difficult to classify as to genre – but not really particularly relevant to the author’s medical career. Nonetheless, a most readable offering, which left me with more questions than answers.
A little less colonial, but still a chronicle of pioneer doctoring in the wilds, is Con Weinberg’s Fragments of a Desert Land (Timmins, 1975). He was decanted fresh from Medical School into the small village of Gibeon in 1926, where he was installed as relieving District Surgeon. There was one automobile in town; alternative transport being horseback or on foot. The nearest hospital was in Windhoek, over three hundred kilometers away, and he notes that while there was a telephone in town, one had to shout very loudly into it to make oneself heard in Windhoek!
Weinberg also had his medical caboose, still of pre-war German vintage, which would be hitched onto the passing trains and he would be transported to hold clinics, or to attend to emergencies up and down the line between Keetmanshoop and the capital. While I was reading this, I repeatedly bumped into shadows of my own family history, as my grandfather had been the travelling medic during the construction of the railway line between Luderitz and Keetmanshoop some twenty years earlier – possibly even working in the same caboose, and almost certainly sharing quarters with the author in Keetmanshoop. An entertaining book, full of incident and written with enough skill to let one feel the grit of the sand between one’s teeth.
Medicine in tropical Africa during the 20th century has been overshadowed by the monumental persona of Albert Schweitzer; theologian, musician, philosopher, missionary and doctor. By 1905 he had already achieved great stature as an authority on church organs and music, as well as being a professor of theology. He felt called to become a doctor so that he “might be able to work without having to talk….but (by) this new form of activity I could not represent myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting of it into practice”. He qualified as a surgeon and doctor seven years later and wasted no time in departing, accompanied by his wife Helene, for Lambarene on the Ogowe River, Gabon.
Though he had been promised a mission building, this was not to materialize and his first patients were treated in a disused fowl-house. WWI came and Schweitzer and his wife were briefly interned as German citizens by the French, but his deprived patients caused such a furore that they were soon set at liberty. It was during the war years that Schweitzer had time to philosophise, and he founded the concept of ‘Reverence for Life’ as an embodiment of his faith and work. Nonetheless he returned to Europe for a spell and only resumed his work at Lambarene in 1924. He funded most of his work from his own income as a lecturer and musician and the hospital grew to some seventy buildings in the next forty years of his labours. He received numerous honours including the Nobel Peace Prize, and died in 1965 and was buried at Lambarene.
I have no idea how many books have been written about the man and his work. Two I have worked through are G Seaver’s Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind ( A & C Black, 1948), and C R Joy & M Arnold’s The Africa of Albert Schweitzer ( A & C Black, 1949). The first is somewhat heavy reading, as are Schweitzer’s own books, Civilization and Ethics, My Life and Thought, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, which cover his philosophical work, his biographical writings: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, From My African Notebook, as well as his two most popular and readable works On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, and More from the Primeval Forest. Whether one likes philosophy or religion, or one merely stands in awe of the man, his humanitarianism and towering intellect, one should try to read one or the other of his works.
Just as Schweitzer battled the horrendous tropical scourges that afflict the inhabitants of West Africa, so did Michael Gelfand in South Central Africa. He wrote a goodly number of books dealing with subtropical medicine, as well as traditional healing and witchcraft practices among the tribespeople of Zimbabwe. The Sick African (Stewart, 1943) is too clinical for the lay reader, but Medicine and Custom in Africa (E & S Livingstone, 1964) is an account of the 'medical anthropology' of Africa, in which he examines the history of healing and materia medica, as well as occult practices. In another quite interesting title, Livingstone the Doctor – his Life and Travels (Basil Blackwell, 1957) he gives a critical evaluation of the great missionary/explorer’s medical role during his African sojourn. Another work, Mother Patrick and her Nursing Sisters (Juta, 1964) paints a faithful picture of the first attempts at providing a medical service to the new colony that was Rhodesia; as does the book A Service to the Sick (Mambo Press, 1976) in which he relates the development of medical treatment for Africans between 1890 and 1953. Medicine and Magic of the Mashona (Juta, 1956) delves into more ethnographical fields, as does Witch Doctor (Harvill Press, 1964) for good measure. As far as I’m aware, his last book in this vein to appear was The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe (Mambo Press, 1985), but the indefatigable doctor also collaborated with P W Laidler in writing South Africa, its Medical History (Struik, 1971). Gelfand’s books certainly belong onto the shelves of anybody interested in indigenous medicine and ethnography, while all collectors of Rhodesiana should follow suit, more especially since he also wrote a handful of other historical works.
There are a large number of little memoirs written by and about doctors in private practice in small towns and in the cities of the subcontinent. I can’t claim to have read that many, since a little medicine tends to go a long way with me. The best tales are usually those which are light on technical detail and rich in human tapestry. One of the former is D Gamsu’s Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon (Hugh Keartland, 1967) which is ill-named, since it is more of a whodunit, recalling the most memorable manslaughters, murders attempted and successful as well as fraudulent claims for injuries never suffered. It reads more like Benjamin Bennett than Chris Barnard. Speaking of the latter, one needs to have been born in Beaufort West to enable one to wade through the pages of this flamboyant heart-throb of the female gender (if he is to be believed). Much more charming was the little volume entitled Salt River Doctor by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981), or Dr Dingle’s cheerful memoir And the Doctor Recovered (Timmins, 1959). One of my firm favourites is C Louis Leipoldt’s Bushveld Doctor (Jonathan Cape, 1937) in which he describes his years after the end of the Boer War, ministering to the needs of the poor rural Afrikaner and especially their children in the Northern Transvaal. Many of these waifs were miserably ill-nourished, malaria and bilharzia-ridden, and in some cases scarcely able to assimilate any knowledge during their school hours because of their physical condition. A thoroughly engaging social document of the times.
There is no shortage of historical material on the theme. The Victorian medical men – and women – were not reticent about their activities. Some of the good doctors cured men’s bodies so that they could indulge in scientific adventures with the proceeds, as Emil Holub did. He intermittently dosed, patched and otherwise cured prospectors at the Diamond Fields for years before amassing enough funds to be able to lead three expeditions to the upper reaches of the Zambezi, where he made a name for himself as an explorer and recorder of strange peoples, animals and plants; which he ably describes (at some length) in his two-volume work Seven Years in South Africa (various German and English eds). J W Matthews’s work Incwadi Yami (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 & Africana Book Society, 1976) is in a similar vein, based mainly on the Diamond Fields, but the author prefers at least a modicum of the comforts of civilization, so he did not take to the wilds. Still, a lively and entertaining book on conditions in the ‘Wild West’ of South Africa. Another book dealing with this period and region is Lure of the Stone by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976), which chronicles the career of our own ‘Lady of the Lamp’ Sister Henrietta Stockdale, who was instrumental in bringing some relief to the diggers who were struck down by the major killers of the time, pneumonia, typhoid, typhus fever and dysentery. Sister Henrietta nursed and taught others to nurse for some two decades, right through the siege of Kimberley, and comes across as rather a martinet from this short biography, which reads something like a medical Who’s Who of the times.
Speaking of those times – the Anglo-Boer War was a period of intense medical activity, on both sides of the conflict. While the British potentially had a well-equipped medical service, with staff, equipment and medicines, they had not reckoned with the far-flung nature of the conflict across the subcontinent. The Boers, on the other hand, were short of trained personnel, which was in part supplied by sympathizers from a number of European countries, many of whom left memoirs of their years in the field. A vast amount of this information has been assembled by Kay de Villiers in his monumental work on the history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War, entitled Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, 2 Vols (Protea Book House, 2008). For anybody with an interest in the conflict, these works are an absolute must; the reader interested in medical history will find a feast, and the student and researcher will find much well-researched and documented fact, and even the casual browser will find a wealth of interesting anecdote, to be dipped into time and again – a tour de force in this genre.
There are the stories of the men and women who healed their fellow man. Then there are the stories of the institutions. The South African Institute for Medical Research has a very special place in my heart, because my mother worked there and in the serum laboratories at Rietfontein; so I have spent many hours wandering round the corridors of the august edifice designed by Sir Herbert Baker and built on Hospital Hill, as well as among the animal cages during my youth. M Malan’s book In Quest of Health (Lowry, 1988) traces the history of this world-renowned institution from its earliest beginnings due to fears of infectious diseases among the mineworkers in Johannesburg. During the period between the wars, extensive research was done with plague, relapsing fever, histoplasmosis, sporotrichosis, bilharzia and numerous other diseases, but what brought the institute to world attention was the production of a controversial vaccine against poliomyelitis, that dreaded killer of children in the early fifties. My sibling and I were probably among the first batches of schoolchildren to be inoculated with this virus, so once more it is of personal interest – but more of polio vaccine later. Lately the institute is engaged in research into the immunology of the AIDS pandemic. The book is no easy afternoon’s read, but for the interested layman and medico, a serious contender for their attention.
Certainly there are a number of histories of hospitals and medical schools, but none better to mention here than the definitive work on the history of Groote Schuur At the Heart of Healing (Jacana, 2008) by Anne Digby and Howard Phillips. The authors have written a scholarly yet very human history of this iconic institution and the caring people who staff it from the most menial positions to the top consultants. They trace the rising fortunes of the hospital when money poured in after the blaze of the spotlights had focused on the revolutionary heart transplant successes, and the gradual decline in funding during the latter years, as management struggled to come to terms with the integration of patients and staff in the New South Africa.
Lastly, to return to polio vaccines, and the rumours that it might be an ‘escaped’ plague – an experiment that went wrong. For readers who really love a challenging read, I would suggest you try E Hooper’s medical whodunit entitled The River (Penguin, 2000). The author is a medical sleuth, hot on the trail of the root cause of AIDS - epidemiological detective work; a truly remarkable attempt to trace the possible origins of the world pandemic, as well as its diffusion, from postulated beginnings with a live polio vaccine derived from chimpanzees (who have become acclimatized to their own form of SIV), which was supposedly distributed among Central African villagers. Probably there are huge holes that need to be plugged in the theory, but I have to admit I was hooked from beginning to end, though the medspeak left me bewildered on more than one occasion.
And now I am going off to have a drink to your continued good health!
The ills that afflict the human condition must be an eternal subject of interest to most people. Just listen in when a bunch of ‘mature’ people get together – first up on the agenda are the aches and pains that are experienced, as well as the miracle - or other cures that have been found.
So we’ll have a look at medicine in the Dark Continent, as well as a few related matters. I’ve always thought of the personage who used to be known as the District Surgeon, as a romantic figure who drove a clapped-out Ford or Studebaker sedan over unspeakable tracks in the Bush, with a black orderly/assistant next to him, and a rifle handy on the back seat among the paraphernalia of his profession. This was the Bundu Doctor, and I met a number of these worthy gentlemen in the flesh during the mid 1950’s.
It was with great delight that I actually found a book with just that title only a month or two back, written by a pukka sahib, Colonel (Dr) J Whitby (R Hale, 1961) covering his experiences in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, whence he had been posted after extensive duty in the Far East. I immersed myself in the book without further ado, expecting a bizarre array of cases, circumstances and humorous anecdotes. Despite the title, I was a little disappointed. Although the good doctor had a truly sympathetic touch with sufferers from a host of maladies, his writing is infused with racial stereotyping, generalisations ad nauseam, military and colonial attitudes and a fine disregard for the spelling of place-names. His chapter on witchcraft and the results on the affected tribespeople is of interest, and his description of setting a patient’s broken leg via radio instructions to a panicky wife, is an absolute howler, while one or two episodes described smack of being ‘bundu legends’.
The author spent time in his mobile surgery in the ‘doctor’s bogie’, a special wagon hitched onto the train that traversed the country from south to north. It would stop at every small station and the ailing populace would flock in for treatment, often necessitating the bogie’s being left behind in a siding to be hooked up by the next train. Altogether the book is a fair reflection of life in the colonies in the late 1940s, and it paints a good picture of the little settlement of Maun in the Okavango, as well as the Zambian Copperbelt.
Subsequently he was to enter the services of WNLA as the Medical Officer who checked out the avalanche of humanity absorbed by the Witwatersrand gold mines, only to be spat out when their contracts had expired. He devotes more than a whole chapter to the methods used by this organization, as well as the many benefits that the Africans enjoyed due to the system, which operated from a numbers of centres in the Caprivi, Barotseland, Southern Rhodesia and Mozambique.
A medico of an entirely different calibre is Alberto Denti di Pirajno, who wrote two books: A Cure for Serpents (Andre Deutsch, 1955) and A Grave for a Dolphin (1956), on his experiences. The good doctor starts his first book with charming reminiscences
among the Berber and Tuareg people of Tripolitania. None of the dour medical details, but intimate cameos of a kaleidoscope of patients, interspersed with snippets of local folklore and flavours from the Arabian Nights. While his treatments might not always have had the full endorsement of the British Medical Association, his cure for impotence, to which the title of the book refers is certainly a novel one which smacks of the time-honoured sleight of hand used by quacks to extract demons or extraneous objects from the patients’ bodies. An endearing quality of Pirajno’s writing is the lack of judgmental pontificating – as he cheerfully treats prostitutes, beggars, villagers or pashas, acknowledging their common humanity.
His next appointment was in Eritrea, this time as Regional Commissioner, but he still had to deputise occasionally for the MO. A hunting trip into the inhospitable desert; a bevy of beautiful women weaving their intrigues; tribal feuds and hashish smuggling all feature in this eventful period at Massawa, before he was transferred to the capital of Asmara for a spell before WWII. The book ends on a sombre note as the good doctor had been posted to Tripoli as the city’s governor and he had to surrender it to Montgomery’s forces.
The second book is a strange tale of a foundling Venus, a love story, of dolphins and of magic – very difficult to classify as to genre – but not really particularly relevant to the author’s medical career. Nonetheless, a most readable offering, which left me with more questions than answers.
A little less colonial, but still a chronicle of pioneer doctoring in the wilds, is Con Weinberg’s Fragments of a Desert Land (Timmins, 1975). He was decanted fresh from Medical School into the small village of Gibeon in 1926, where he was installed as relieving District Surgeon. There was one automobile in town; alternative transport being horseback or on foot. The nearest hospital was in Windhoek, over three hundred kilometers away, and he notes that while there was a telephone in town, one had to shout very loudly into it to make oneself heard in Windhoek!
Weinberg also had his medical caboose, still of pre-war German vintage, which would be hitched onto the passing trains and he would be transported to hold clinics, or to attend to emergencies up and down the line between Keetmanshoop and the capital. While I was reading this, I repeatedly bumped into shadows of my own family history, as my grandfather had been the travelling medic during the construction of the railway line between Luderitz and Keetmanshoop some twenty years earlier – possibly even working in the same caboose, and almost certainly sharing quarters with the author in Keetmanshoop. An entertaining book, full of incident and written with enough skill to let one feel the grit of the sand between one’s teeth.
Medicine in tropical Africa during the 20th century has been overshadowed by the monumental persona of Albert Schweitzer; theologian, musician, philosopher, missionary and doctor. By 1905 he had already achieved great stature as an authority on church organs and music, as well as being a professor of theology. He felt called to become a doctor so that he “might be able to work without having to talk….but (by) this new form of activity I could not represent myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting of it into practice”. He qualified as a surgeon and doctor seven years later and wasted no time in departing, accompanied by his wife Helene, for Lambarene on the Ogowe River, Gabon.
Though he had been promised a mission building, this was not to materialize and his first patients were treated in a disused fowl-house. WWI came and Schweitzer and his wife were briefly interned as German citizens by the French, but his deprived patients caused such a furore that they were soon set at liberty. It was during the war years that Schweitzer had time to philosophise, and he founded the concept of ‘Reverence for Life’ as an embodiment of his faith and work. Nonetheless he returned to Europe for a spell and only resumed his work at Lambarene in 1924. He funded most of his work from his own income as a lecturer and musician and the hospital grew to some seventy buildings in the next forty years of his labours. He received numerous honours including the Nobel Peace Prize, and died in 1965 and was buried at Lambarene.
I have no idea how many books have been written about the man and his work. Two I have worked through are G Seaver’s Albert Schweitzer, the Man and his Mind ( A & C Black, 1948), and C R Joy & M Arnold’s The Africa of Albert Schweitzer ( A & C Black, 1949). The first is somewhat heavy reading, as are Schweitzer’s own books, Civilization and Ethics, My Life and Thought, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, which cover his philosophical work, his biographical writings: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, From My African Notebook, as well as his two most popular and readable works On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, and More from the Primeval Forest. Whether one likes philosophy or religion, or one merely stands in awe of the man, his humanitarianism and towering intellect, one should try to read one or the other of his works.
Just as Schweitzer battled the horrendous tropical scourges that afflict the inhabitants of West Africa, so did Michael Gelfand in South Central Africa. He wrote a goodly number of books dealing with subtropical medicine, as well as traditional healing and witchcraft practices among the tribespeople of Zimbabwe. The Sick African (Stewart, 1943) is too clinical for the lay reader, but Medicine and Custom in Africa (E & S Livingstone, 1964) is an account of the 'medical anthropology' of Africa, in which he examines the history of healing and materia medica, as well as occult practices. In another quite interesting title, Livingstone the Doctor – his Life and Travels (Basil Blackwell, 1957) he gives a critical evaluation of the great missionary/explorer’s medical role during his African sojourn. Another work, Mother Patrick and her Nursing Sisters (Juta, 1964) paints a faithful picture of the first attempts at providing a medical service to the new colony that was Rhodesia; as does the book A Service to the Sick (Mambo Press, 1976) in which he relates the development of medical treatment for Africans between 1890 and 1953. Medicine and Magic of the Mashona (Juta, 1956) delves into more ethnographical fields, as does Witch Doctor (Harvill Press, 1964) for good measure. As far as I’m aware, his last book in this vein to appear was The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe (Mambo Press, 1985), but the indefatigable doctor also collaborated with P W Laidler in writing South Africa, its Medical History (Struik, 1971). Gelfand’s books certainly belong onto the shelves of anybody interested in indigenous medicine and ethnography, while all collectors of Rhodesiana should follow suit, more especially since he also wrote a handful of other historical works.
There are a large number of little memoirs written by and about doctors in private practice in small towns and in the cities of the subcontinent. I can’t claim to have read that many, since a little medicine tends to go a long way with me. The best tales are usually those which are light on technical detail and rich in human tapestry. One of the former is D Gamsu’s Adventures of a South African Brain Surgeon (Hugh Keartland, 1967) which is ill-named, since it is more of a whodunit, recalling the most memorable manslaughters, murders attempted and successful as well as fraudulent claims for injuries never suffered. It reads more like Benjamin Bennett than Chris Barnard. Speaking of the latter, one needs to have been born in Beaufort West to enable one to wade through the pages of this flamboyant heart-throb of the female gender (if he is to be believed). Much more charming was the little volume entitled Salt River Doctor by B A Mackenzie (Faircape, 1981), or Dr Dingle’s cheerful memoir And the Doctor Recovered (Timmins, 1959). One of my firm favourites is C Louis Leipoldt’s Bushveld Doctor (Jonathan Cape, 1937) in which he describes his years after the end of the Boer War, ministering to the needs of the poor rural Afrikaner and especially their children in the Northern Transvaal. Many of these waifs were miserably ill-nourished, malaria and bilharzia-ridden, and in some cases scarcely able to assimilate any knowledge during their school hours because of their physical condition. A thoroughly engaging social document of the times.
There is no shortage of historical material on the theme. The Victorian medical men – and women – were not reticent about their activities. Some of the good doctors cured men’s bodies so that they could indulge in scientific adventures with the proceeds, as Emil Holub did. He intermittently dosed, patched and otherwise cured prospectors at the Diamond Fields for years before amassing enough funds to be able to lead three expeditions to the upper reaches of the Zambezi, where he made a name for himself as an explorer and recorder of strange peoples, animals and plants; which he ably describes (at some length) in his two-volume work Seven Years in South Africa (various German and English eds). J W Matthews’s work Incwadi Yami (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1877 & Africana Book Society, 1976) is in a similar vein, based mainly on the Diamond Fields, but the author prefers at least a modicum of the comforts of civilization, so he did not take to the wilds. Still, a lively and entertaining book on conditions in the ‘Wild West’ of South Africa. Another book dealing with this period and region is Lure of the Stone by W M & V Buss (Timmins, 1976), which chronicles the career of our own ‘Lady of the Lamp’ Sister Henrietta Stockdale, who was instrumental in bringing some relief to the diggers who were struck down by the major killers of the time, pneumonia, typhoid, typhus fever and dysentery. Sister Henrietta nursed and taught others to nurse for some two decades, right through the siege of Kimberley, and comes across as rather a martinet from this short biography, which reads something like a medical Who’s Who of the times.
Speaking of those times – the Anglo-Boer War was a period of intense medical activity, on both sides of the conflict. While the British potentially had a well-equipped medical service, with staff, equipment and medicines, they had not reckoned with the far-flung nature of the conflict across the subcontinent. The Boers, on the other hand, were short of trained personnel, which was in part supplied by sympathizers from a number of European countries, many of whom left memoirs of their years in the field. A vast amount of this information has been assembled by Kay de Villiers in his monumental work on the history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War, entitled Healers, Helpers and Hospitals, 2 Vols (Protea Book House, 2008). For anybody with an interest in the conflict, these works are an absolute must; the reader interested in medical history will find a feast, and the student and researcher will find much well-researched and documented fact, and even the casual browser will find a wealth of interesting anecdote, to be dipped into time and again – a tour de force in this genre.
There are the stories of the men and women who healed their fellow man. Then there are the stories of the institutions. The South African Institute for Medical Research has a very special place in my heart, because my mother worked there and in the serum laboratories at Rietfontein; so I have spent many hours wandering round the corridors of the august edifice designed by Sir Herbert Baker and built on Hospital Hill, as well as among the animal cages during my youth. M Malan’s book In Quest of Health (Lowry, 1988) traces the history of this world-renowned institution from its earliest beginnings due to fears of infectious diseases among the mineworkers in Johannesburg. During the period between the wars, extensive research was done with plague, relapsing fever, histoplasmosis, sporotrichosis, bilharzia and numerous other diseases, but what brought the institute to world attention was the production of a controversial vaccine against poliomyelitis, that dreaded killer of children in the early fifties. My sibling and I were probably among the first batches of schoolchildren to be inoculated with this virus, so once more it is of personal interest – but more of polio vaccine later. Lately the institute is engaged in research into the immunology of the AIDS pandemic. The book is no easy afternoon’s read, but for the interested layman and medico, a serious contender for their attention.
Certainly there are a number of histories of hospitals and medical schools, but none better to mention here than the definitive work on the history of Groote Schuur At the Heart of Healing (Jacana, 2008) by Anne Digby and Howard Phillips. The authors have written a scholarly yet very human history of this iconic institution and the caring people who staff it from the most menial positions to the top consultants. They trace the rising fortunes of the hospital when money poured in after the blaze of the spotlights had focused on the revolutionary heart transplant successes, and the gradual decline in funding during the latter years, as management struggled to come to terms with the integration of patients and staff in the New South Africa.
Lastly, to return to polio vaccines, and the rumours that it might be an ‘escaped’ plague – an experiment that went wrong. For readers who really love a challenging read, I would suggest you try E Hooper’s medical whodunit entitled The River (Penguin, 2000). The author is a medical sleuth, hot on the trail of the root cause of AIDS - epidemiological detective work; a truly remarkable attempt to trace the possible origins of the world pandemic, as well as its diffusion, from postulated beginnings with a live polio vaccine derived from chimpanzees (who have become acclimatized to their own form of SIV), which was supposedly distributed among Central African villagers. Probably there are huge holes that need to be plugged in the theory, but I have to admit I was hooked from beginning to end, though the medspeak left me bewildered on more than one occasion.
And now I am going off to have a drink to your continued good health!
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