Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa Read Online Free PDF Page B

registrar - a system by which the
government got a specialist for rather less than it would have to pay a plumber
- before being appointed a consultant well into his forties. He enjoyed his
post for less than ten years before being struck down in the operating theatre
by a stroke. They found him a sinecure in a convalescent hospital, and it was
at his fireside in this place with his good hand that he produced the
collection of drawings I took with me to Ghana which in due course bore fruit
in the case of the unsuspecting Sammy.
    The operation went successfully: at any
rate Sammy never came back for more. I found myself with a back-log of hernias,
which are common on the Coast owing to the depredations of the filaria worm.
(Des, who was a sick man by then, had confined himself to emergencies.) When a
doctor gets a reputation for surgery in Africa, he does not lack customers, and
I found myself doing one a week and becoming a fair exponent of the Bassini,
which is not a concerto grosso but the standard operation for inguinal hernia,
named after the eponymous professor of Padua.
    My fame spread. One of the African
managers gave a lift to some ladies in the back of his Land Rover, where he
overheard them singing my praises. 'Did you hear how he fixed Kobina's hernia?
Who would have married him with a thing like that?'
     
    One evening I was called out of the club
to deal with a dead woman: not to pronounce her 'dead on arrival': doctors are
too thin on the ground in Africa for such nonsense as that, which is performed
by the senior nurse on duty. This one had a special problem. She had died in
childbirth, and the afterbirth was retained. Custom forbad burial with such an
unclean object inside her. I found her lying in the back of a lorry, which had
brought her miles across country.
    I thought it was superfluous to transfer
the body to the mortuary. I could just as well do the business where she was.
Apron, gloves and a lamp were brought.
    'Ah well!' I thought. 'Our work is
altruistic,' echoing the words of one of my old chiefs in Liverpool after
requesting the houseman to perform a manual removal of faeces.
    How did our mentors describe the
sensation of removing a retained afterbirth? Like shaking hands with a gorilla?
I wonder how many of them did it on a patient six hours dead and iron-hard with
rigor mortis, and how they would describe that. Having been there myself, I
would compare it to the technique of the rock-climber, Joe Brown, who would
thrust his hand into a crevice, close his fist and swing on it.
    I did my best, and removed enough of the
stuff to carry conviction, including the tell-tale umbilical cord. I stepped
down, sweating and shaking with the effort.
    I was greeted with contented faces
around me. Honour was satisfied. The family were at ease in their grief.
    In the words of Trousseau: 'to cure
sometimes...to comfort always.'
     
    A woman was brought in who had suffered
bleeding after childbirth. (I do not remember a baby, which may have died.) She
had been treated by a native ‘herbalist’, who had stuffed a great quantity of
his/her wares into the affected parts, and we first had to remove and wash out
a lot of foul material and exhibit antibiotics, etc.
    After a day or two, Mr Sackey approached
me with an expressionless face and announced that 'the patient's condition had
changed' - an ominous formula in the mouth of an African nurse, only exceeded
in menace by 'the patient is gasping'.
    I went with him to the ward, and saw
tetanus for the first time in my life. ( This was, of course, before
the ‘ritual murder’).
    At that moment the visitors burst in: a
noisy bubbling African crowd. I said to Sackey: 'Mr Sackey, the ward has got to
be kept quiet.'
    Mr Sackey turned on his heel and in the
tones of RSM Brittan (who in his day was the biggest voice in the British
Army), bellowed:
    'Now, you visitors, listen to me! We
have a very sick woman here. DEE WARD GOTTA BE KEP' QUIET!!!'
    As might have been expected,