About the book
Like many young Scottish doctors in the 19th century, my great- grandfather went abroad, in his case to China, a country still reeling from the effects of the Opium wars. Patrick worked first in Taiwan (Taipei) and from there crossed the sea to the port of Amoy on the coast of Fujian. I had planned to follow in his footsteps when Covid struck. Now I could no longer walk along the beach at Gulangyu Island where Patrick had lived, listening to the drumming of the waves on the rocks. Nor could I admire the exotic villas built by rich merchants who made this tiny island their home. Now it is a World Heritage site visited by millions. I wanted too to visit Xiamen (old Amoy) now a bustling modern city with a university and medical school and free of the diseases of Patrick’s time. So I visited remotely through the website of ‘Amoy Bill’ Professor William Brown of Xiamen university, www.amoymagic.com It is interesting how a small walled town on the South China coast was the place where mosquitoes were first proved to be vectors of disease.
I moved from China to the ancient city of Alexandria in Egypt in the early 19th century, a city of opportunity for another young Scottish youth under the rule of Muhammed Ali Pasha. The mosquitoes followed me . Plagues swept in with pilgrims to Mecca. Early travellers on the Nile were beset with diseases, some avoidable like syphilis and some unavoidable like malaria, trachoma and bilharzia. Malaria and dysentery followed the troops to Palestine in 1917.
Not all the book is medical. Merchants bring a new aspect to the travels, moving to Russia where opportunity again beckoned under the rule of Catherine the Great.
A French-speaking Philippe Blessig left his home in Strasbourg to struggle in the swamp that was St Petersburg and ended up owning a palace on the River Neva. His descendants moved to Liverpool, a bit of a comedown.
Interspersed among the chapters are the childhood memories of two children living in Fiji and Kenya at the end of Empire, meeting a cannibal in Fiji, and drinking tea with a Mau Mau general in Kenya,
HOW MANSON FORESAW THE RISE OF CHINA
This was part of an address Manson gave at the inauguration of the Hongkong College of Medicine in 1887:
“A great homogeneous Chinese-speaking nation will spread from Siberia to Australia. It requires little of the prophetic to foresee this. The process has already commenced. In those days wise men will again come from the East. The people who gave us the invention of printing will give yet another peaceful and useful arts; the first to use gunpowder will not be backward in the art of war; the discoverer of inoculation will add again to the prevention and cure of disease. Those hundreds of millions will double the recruiting ground of science and may yet give back to Europe more than what they got. It seems to me sometimes that we are teaching the Chinese to beat ourselves.”
