Liverpool – Tropical Medicine

Liverpool – Tropical Medicine

We set sail from Cape Town in the "Athlone Castle", one of the older Union Castle mail liners, in the middle of December 1959.  It was a large and impressive ship and I had never really been to sea before. The family saw us off at the docks in Cape Town and the ship departed in a festive mood with streamers flying and accompanied by loud music.  We had simple accommodation, a two-bed inner cabin without a porthole.  The first part of the cruise took us through the South Atlantic, and the sea was glassy and smooth.  We basked in the sun, swam in the small swimming pool and enjoyed the food. But as we crossed the equator and entered the wintery northern Atlantic the weather changed. We docked at Madeira to refuel and spent the day touring this well-developed tropical island. As we departed and entered the real northern hemisphere, the windy, blustery climate turned into strong gales with rain and heavy choppy waves and later a turbulent, heaving sea.  We experienced the great climatic biodiversity of the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic drift and the cold water discharged from the major French Rivers, The ship rocked to and fro and by the time we entered the Bay of Biscay it was impossible to walk on the open decks and the chairs in the lounge rocked and crockery danced on the tabletops.  Aileen developed severe seasickness and we were thankful to arrive and disembark in Southampton.

We collected our baggage and took the packed boat train to Waterloo Station in London.  It was pouring with rain as if the heavens had opened and the city was shrouded in a heavy fog. The placid South African summer was now replaced by the cold air masses of the European winter. The grey buildings, the heavy fog and the endless traffic had plunged us into a different world. We took a taxi to the Ford Motor Distributors and picked up our new yellow Ford Anglia with its cutback, back window.  It was an unusual new shape.  We returned to Waterloo Station to pick up our luggage and I'm not sure how we managed the navigation. I was totally overwhelmed. The heavy city traffic, the poor visibility and the sheets of rain created “butterflies in my stomach" as we fled northwards to leave this strange, gigantic congested and terrifying city. Fortunately, the Ford dealer had given me a handful of maps to steer us in the right direction, so we found a bed and breakfast at Hemel Hempstead and stayed the night to calm our nerves.  The next morning was cold and we continued along the A40 to Liverpool. 

We had arranged accommodation through the Tropical School and arrived at our new address, 48 Moscow Drive in the afternoon.  I was shocked by the brown brick working class neighborhood, with its street upon street of post-Victorian row houses which had been built to alleviate the run down areas of the city. Row houses lined the streets and introduced us to the new post war British Society.

A delightful little white-haired lady showed us our accommodation. It was on the 1^st floor: a small bedroom, kitchen and bathroom with gas heating which I had never seen before. 

We made ourselves comfortable.  The rent was reasonable, 2-1/2 pounds a week including a little garage.  The back lane was so narrow that I had to maneuver several times to take out the car.  Liverpool was in the middle of its customary winter fog and it took a few weeks until I was able to explore the neighborhood.  We lived in a workers' quarter which had been built in the early 1920s with brown brick houses and little shopping centers.  At my first visit to the local grocery, the language was so different that no one could understand my accent and that all I wanted was a loaf of bread.  The local dialect was totally different.

Liverpool was an old port city with many rundown poor working-class neighborhoods. It had large slum tenement areas but fortunately it all eventually came "tumbling down" and today these areas have disappeared and a more modern renovated city has developed. It is now likened to the New York of England and has many important architectural landmarks but we never really explored and studied the city. We were a little overawed by the foggy environment which I had never encountered in South Africa.

I had registered at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the university courses started in January.  It was housed in a very uninviting dull gray building. The School had developed in Liverpool because of the sailors and large maritime population who arrived in the important English port from different tropical areas and the school had grown into an international teaching and research centre. Opened in 1899, the school was designed to train expatriate doctors planning to work in the British Colonies in the fundamentals of this new budding branch of Medicine. The local weatherwas quite the opposite of tropical Rhodesia.

I started the day after the New Year, and found the courses very exciting: tropical medicine, public health, parasitology, helminthology, and many laboratory exercises.  Prof. Maegraith, the Dean and Head of Tropical Medicine, was very inspiring and the other teachers very interesting.  I immersed myself in malaria and schistosomiasis but there were many other new exotic diseases and there was time to study the pathological specimens and the microscopic histological specimens as well as charting the natural history of the disease vectors. The courses were close to my heart as they dealt with disease prevention as well as the sociology of poverty and malnutrition which were so common in Southern Africa. I had acquired extensive practical experience in Rhodesia so that the studies were fairly easy and I graduated as the top student with medals in different subjects. 

The students were varied and came from many countries in the British Empire.  There was a competitive spirit and the other two best students came from the Solomon Islands and Singapore. 

I had planned to return to Rhodesia; but Prof. Davies, who had gone through the Japanese occupation of Singapore and was subsequently the director of health in Malaysia, pointed out that I was white and Jewish and that the "winds of change" were blowing through Africa and that I should not return to Rhodesia and that I should choose another specialty in medicine. 

We spent a rough winter in Liverpool.  The weather was tough and the heavy fogs precluded any traveling.  I kept my nose in the books and we had the advantage of a large bay window in the bedroom facing south where I could sit and study when we had rare days of meager sunshine. 

Vincent Harrison, my ex-classmate from Cape Town, was a pediatric registrar at the relatively new Alder Hay Children's Hospital and we would spend two evenings a week revising internal medicine.  His wife, Denise, and Aileen got on well together.  We had no other contacts in Liverpool and rarely made contact with the Jewish community.  We were lost in our own private world.

Aileen worked at a geriatric hospital but became pregnant and found the physical work too heavy. One of our old patients from Gatooma lived in St Helens and he brought us his old 5 inch television. We had never watched "telly" and it fascinated us.

The old Liverpool Royal Infirmary broke my heart. It was a black, red brick building which had turned brown gray from exposure to the soot and weather. The beds in the wards were arranged around the perimeter with a nurses' station in the center. I was supposed to make rounds with Lord Cohen but he spent most of his time in London. In practice, the wards were run by David Price Evans who was developing the embryonic science of pharmacogenetics. The old hospital has since been gutted and replaced by a new modern building.

We never had the opportunity to explore Liverpool carefully as the fog dominated the winter.

Despite the weather, the period at the Tropical School was an invigorating experience; I worked and studied hard and consolidated my knowledge of tropical medicine.

I needed to continue my training in Internal Medicine and although I made rounds in Internal Medicine with Noble Chamberlain at the Southern General Hospital there was the need for more systematic study. At the end of March 1960 we were ready to move ahead.