Salt River Doctor - Barbara Mackenzie

 Salt River Doctor - Barbara Mackenzie - Faircape Books - 1981 - Hard cver with dust cover in good, clean and tight condition.

Here is a piece of medical Africana that was well worth preserving. Barbara Mackenzie is the daughter of the late Dr James Mackenzie, for some years a general practitioner in Salt River, Cape Town, and this little book gives us a series of scenes from his life. Mackenzie was the son of Sconish settlers and obviously a man of dogged perseverance, for he not only qualified in pharmacy in 1887 after apprenticeship to an Aberdeen chemist but much later returned to Aberdeen-with very little money and an Afrikaans wife to study medicine, graduating in 1905. His life in Salt River was hard and not all that materially rewarding, but it was rich in incident and he evidently developed close relationships with his patients, both White and Coloured. When he died in 1917, a deputation from Ndabeni location came to ask if they might be given the privilege of digging his grave ~ what better tribute could a doctor want!