Dr John Dickinson (1832–1863): The man behind the bird

Abstract

The surgeon/naturalists Dr John Kirk, Dr Charles Meller and Dr John Dickinson, associated with the Zambezi Expedition (1857–1864) under the leadership of Dr David Livingstone are, like him, credited with the discovery of new species’ of birds. A raptor, Falco dickinsoni, is named after Dr John Dickinson. Dickinson, born in the north east of England, trained in medicine in Newcastle upon Tyne. He volunteered to join the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and arrived as part of a second group to join Bishop Frederick Mackenzie, then attempting to build a Mission in Magomero, on the Shire Mountain Plateau in modern Malawi. Livingstone and Mackenzie had sown the seeds of disaster for the first UMCA venture while Dickinson was on his way to Central Africa, and his one meeting with Livingstone was trigger to a chain of events that threatened the whole expedition. Shortly after Dickinson’s arrival in Magomero, Bishop Mackenzie and a fellow traveller, Reverend Henry de Wint Burrup, died. Magomero was abandoned and the remaining missionaries retrenched in Chibisa’s Village on the River Shire. There, where Dickinson did most of his bird collecting, on 17 March 1863, he died of blackwater fever. Livingstone and Kirk were present at the burial. A marble cross at Chikwawa in Malawi is marker to the event that occurred on the day of Dr John Dickinson’s 32nd birthday.

Keywords

Dr John Dickinson surgeon/naturalist Zambezi Expedition

Introduction

Medical/surgeon naturalists attached to the Zambezi Expedition (1858–1864) under the leadership and stewardship of Dr David Livingstone included among their duties the collecting of scientific information. Much was original to western natural philosophy. All, taxonomically, are credited with the discovery of new species. Dr David Livingstone (1813–1873) (MD, Glasgow; plants, birds and mammals), Dr John Kirk (1832–1922) (MD, Edinburgh: plants, birds and a mammal), Dr Charles Meller (1836–1869) (St Mary’s, London: plants, a bird, a reptile and a mammal) and Dr John Dickinson (1832–1863) (MB, Durham: bird).^1–3 Livingstone was an eclectic observer, Kirk and Meller were by preference botanists and Dickinson showed a keen interest in microscopy of insects and of Diatomaceae as well as ornithology.⁴

Dickinson’s kestrel (Falco dickinsoni)

Four kestrel species are defined as Africa endemics. One found in riverine habitats and associated with palm tree environments of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa is Dickinson’s kestrel (Falco dickinsoni). Characteristically, it has a yellow cere, white rump and barred tail.

Shot bird specimens were preserved with arsenical soap, and skeletons were discarded. Three skins, of the 113 birds presented by Robert Dickinson (Dr John Dickinson’s younger brother) in 1864 to the Natural History Branch of the British Museum, were of new species and assigned taxonomically, Falco dickinsoni. These three skins – the syntype series – came from Chibisa (now Chikwawa) area of Malawi in Central Africa.^5–7

Recently, the syntype series has been reviewed (Conacher, personal communication). The case for the first and second specimens has proved relatively easy to define: one is the designated specimen ‘type’ and, like all UK-defined types, is kept separately in the National Collection in the British Museum Natural History facility in Tring. In 1864 a second specimen was presented by Mrs Dickinson of Jarrow to the Natural History Society of Northumbria where it has been relatively undisturbed: it is now stored in the vaults of the Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne. It was part of a small collection returned to the Dickinson family after John’s death and the process of classification. The third syntype, now stored among the 30 or so skins of Falco dickinsoni in the main National Collection at Tring, was probably given or purchased by a prominent raptor authority and collector, JH Gurney (1819–1890), and added later to the National collection. Kirk and Meller contributed skin specimens of Falco dickinsoni that have ended up in the National Collection: Dickinson gets the species new finding credit on the precedence of acquisition (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Newcastle ‘syntype’ of Falco dickinsoni. (Photo: courtesy Northumbria Natural History Society, Newcastle upon Tyne).

John Dickinson had started his collection of African birds in the months of June/July 1861 on Johanna. Now known as Anjuan, this island in the Comoro archipelago was to become famous as the site of one of the greatest natural science findings of the 20th century, the living fossil, the coelacanth.⁸ It, too, is the home of the eponymous Livingstone’s fruit bat, Pteropus livingstonii, which is close to extinction.

Dickinson, like several of the Zambezi Expedition, was housed on the estate of the local Consul, waiting for favourable circumstance of transport and weather to undertake the complex exercise of entering the Zambezi Delta, then, as had been for hundreds of years, under Portuguese hegemony and who were still highly complicit in the Slave Trade.⁹

Early years

John Dickinson was born in Jarrow in the Northeast of England on 18 March 1832.¹⁰ Jarrow was a village, numbering fewer than a thousand souls around the Church of St Paul’s, which was sited next to the ruin of a monastery. A Georgian mansion house dominated the hill to the north of the Church. Now a museum, it has an imposing view over the Tyne close to a tidal saltmarsh and mudflats into which the River Don flows and known as the Slake (a derivation of Jarrow’s Lake), largely drained now and built over by the Tyne Dock. The mansion resident owned much of the land and the coal mine that was the village mainstay of employment.

Dickinson’s father, also John, was a butcher by trade and his mother was Margaret. He had three older sisters, an older brother and two younger brothers, Joseph and Robert, the latter in due course presenting John’s bird specimens to the British Museum.

The Royal Ancient and Monastic Parish Church of St Paul is on the site of an old monastery. As the home of the Venerable Bede, it is one of the most famous and significant of sites in Christendom and early ecumenical thought and, before its sacking by Vikings in 794, a centre of science and learning.¹¹ Its medieval revival was dealt with another blow in 1536 for it became an early victim of the Dissolution. Such ill fate continued for in 1940, the Church was bombed with major damage of significance – to the Dickinson story – to its stained glass windows.

In 1828 John Dickinson senior was serving as Church Warden as did, in due course, the oldest son, William, from 1869 until the turn of the 20th century. The older sister, Mary Ann, in 1907 and aged 80, is the last person to have been interred in the St Paul’s Churchyard. A stained glass window commemorating her life, unlike that to her brother, survives in St Paul’s Church, Jarrow. John was baptised into the Anglican faith on 28 March 1832.

John Dickinson was schooled at Monkton, a nearby hamlet in the Parish of St Paul’s Church, Jarrow.¹² With such steeping and a family tradition of service to St Paul’s Church, it is not hard to see it as source of a comment on his character that he was possessed of ‘ … simple and earnest practical piety’ and that the one and only significant comment by David Livingstone on Dickinson refers to him ‘ … as deeply religious’.^10–13

Although by 1859 the need to be of the Anglican faith and subscription to its 39 Articles was no longer a requirement for entrance to the best English universities, prestigious ones like Durham, Oxford and Cambridge would have looked on Dickinson’s application with favour because of it and as counter to his humble and trade origin. That the cost of a university education could be borne by the Dickinson family is probably due to the shrewd investments of Dickinson senior in several trading sailing ships. Later evidence is that the family in fact had considerable wealth beyond the butcher’s business.

A taste for natural science

A substantial bridge, still a walkway, on the road East to South Shields and Sunderland crosses the River Don, a tributary of the Tyne. The early Victorian population was housed close to the church but the main village of Jarrow, including Bede’s Place, was about a half mile away and beyond the substantial manor house, Jarrow Hall. This belonged to the mine owner of Jarrow Colliery which had, in 1832, an evil reputation related chiefly to its poor ventilation systems.

Nicknamed the ‘fiery’ pit, 32 men and boys died there in 1826 and another 42 were killed in an explosion in 1830. Labour unrest followed when ‘seven lads of Jarrow’ were transported to Botany Bay; troops were sent in to evict miners from cottages close to the church. The unrest culminated in the murder of a local magistrate. For the crime, Thomas Jobling was executed and sentenced to be gibbeted on the Slake in 1832. This gruesome process was conducted but the tarred body in the iron cage disappeared shortly after – Jobling having become something of a local hero. The gibbet remained in place for another 25 years, until the arrival of the railway line from Newcastle to Sunderland. In fulfilling its salutary purpose, it would have been a highly visible part of the landscape of the child and young man that was John Dickinson.

The Slake was famous for congregations of waders, sea birds and wild fowl, and Dickinson’s father, as the local butcher, if not partaking in shooting, would certainly have had access to the shot game. Several taxidermists prepared specimens of birds acquired from the area for a local squire. The taste for natural science as well as the rudiments of the skills of shooting for collection and even the preparation and preservation could well have been learnt and acquired as a result of John Dickinson’s childhood association with the Slake. ‘ … and formed that taste for natural science, and aptitude for applying his knowledge, which specially distinguished him when he joined the Central African Mission’.¹⁰

Medical education (1847–1859)

In 1847 the 15-year-old John was apprenticed to Dr Wallis in the nearby town of South Shields.¹² The relatively recently found accounts of a doctor’s apprentice, Thomas G Wright, who slightly earlier than Dickinson had served his time on the other side of the River Tyne, suggest that this would have been an arduous period, physically and intellectually, bearing in mind that Livingstone was later to label him as ‘a very weakly subject’.^13,14 Importantly, it would have been in this period that Dickinson acquired the skill to prepare various potions and tablets, notably, in due course in Africa, the famous Livingstone ‘rousers’.¹⁵

Dickinson’s medical education starts at the conjunction of events much reflected in the way of training of the 20th century British doctor. The rationalization and legislation controlling the anatomy schools on which medical colleges were being founded had led to rivalries of the kind enjoyed by all but the doctors involved in the various 19th century feuds for the hearts, minds and funds of their students. As it was put at the time ‘ … the good people of Newcastle have been kept in a state of excitement by the ‘battle of the two schools’ in which, for the edification of the public, the worthy doctors have been purging and scarifying each other’.¹⁶

The battling parties from two separate schools in Newcastle and the academics of the University of Durham came together, and a unified establishment, purpose built and grand, was developed out of an old mansion near the Central Station in Newcastle upon Tyne. Its neighbour was the imposing Literary and Philosophical Society and just a few hundred yards away, on a site now occupied by the Centre for Life, was the Newcastle Infirmary.

This, the Orchard Street facility, served as the College of Medicine of the University of Durham from 1852 until 1883. John Dickinson, one of the first residents in the on-site accommodation of Neville Hall, was awarded a Licence in Medicine in 1856 and became first of the three to be awarded the Bachelor of Medicine in 1859 and to be registered by the then newly formed General Medical Council, established as a result of the Medical Act of 1858.^17,18

Dennis Embleton, later the Professor of Medicine and ‘probably the last physician to test for diabetes by tasting the urine’, describes the process for the early MB examination.¹⁹

A thesis had to be submitted; prescribed subjects for 1858 were rheumatism or pleurisy or cholera. Dickinson is reported to have prepared a thesis ‘On apoplexy’ for the MD but it was not submitted.¹² Given the fluid situation in medical education, it is possible that ‘Apoplexy’ was an 1859 topic for MB. His two fellow graduates went on to be awarded the MD in 1861 but, by then, Dickinson was on his way to Central Africa. In addition to the thesis, each candidate underwent a viva-voce examination, a gruelling one and half hours long and conducted by six examiners. In 1858 the examiners would have come from that list of 22 lecturers covering those subjects recognizable in the 20th century and ranging from chemistry, botany, anatomy, physiology, mental diseases, surgery, midwifery, medical ethics and jurisprudence to materia medica and therapeutics.¹⁹

Africa 1859–1863

Universities’ Mission to Central Africa

On 4 December 1857, at the Senate House at Cambridge, the hero of the moment Dr David Livingstone on a triumphal return from his double crossing of the African continent and the discovery of the Victoria Falls issued a challenge. ‘ … I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work, which I have begun? I leave it with you’ (Livingstone, 1857).

The answer to this clarion call was the establishment of the Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central Africa.^20,21 One of the leading lights was Sam Wilberforce (a son of William), Bishop of Oxford and later known by the epithet ‘Soapy Sam’ after a Benjamin Disraeli reference to his skills in religious argument and not to the fact that Wilberforce was to become the spokesman of those defending the Anglican Church against the novel Darwinian theories of evolution, Origin of Species not being published until 1859. That year, the Universities of Dublin and Durham had joined the Mission movement under the nominated and active lead of Reverend Charles Frederick Mackenzie, an Anglican cleric and veteran of Southern Africa.²²

A letter of application by Dickinson was sent from Jarrow in late December 1860: ‘I beg to offer myself as a candidate to go out with the African Mission’. By this time, Dr Dickinson was in practice in Gilling in North Yorkshire having before and since 1856 been a practice assistant in Willington, County Durham.²³ His supporter and referee was Professor Chevallier (1794–1873) of Durham.

By early 1861 formalities were completed and on 6 April 1861 Dr John Dickinson joined the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa as Medical Officer, officially on the day he left England. His passport number was 45,164, and he had been photographed for the only known time at a famous studio, J Downey & Sons, in his home area of South Shields. The likeness was to become the iconic and enduring one for etchings, a memorial plaque and possibly, as one is yet to be found for the record, a gold medal (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The only known photograph of Dr John Dickinson, MB (Dunelm) (Courtesy: USPG @ Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford).

On the day of his joining the UMCA, Dickinson met with others of the second contingent to the Mission: Reverend Henry de Wint Burrup and his wife of four days, Elizabeth; and the artisans Blair and Clarke, mission printer and tanner in waiting, respectively. They set sail for Africa from Southampton in the SS Norman on 6 April 1861. The group arrived, after an unremarkable trip, in Cape Town, South Africa on 15 May 1861. Dickinson travelled to Johanna, having preceded Burrup and the two artisans from Simonstown, South Africa courtesy of HMS Penguin early in June 1861.²⁴

Into Central Africa

While Dickinson was in Johanna, the advance party of the Mission, now under the guidance of David Livingstone and led by the newly consecrated Bishop Mackenzie, was approaching the chosen site for the first UMCA Mission.

It had, for the Bishop, been a very eventful but not particularly productive – in his terms – seven months since he had left English shores. At last, with a sense of purpose and striding confidently and elated up into the Shire Highlands from Chibisa’s Village, his crozier in one hand and a gun in his other, the Bishop could hardly have imagined how quickly the firearm would eclipse the symbolism of the former. It was an incident not of his making.

David Livingstone, for the first time in all his travels, crossed a line he had so actively avoided despite years of provocation and neutrality in the face of the slave gangs he came across frequently with their slavers, on whom he had on occasion to rely. He even questioned his own motives for breaking his own rules: ‘Logic is out of place when the question with a true-hearted man is, whether his brother-man is to be saved or not’.²⁵

In releasing more than 80 slaves and seeing off their captors at Mbame at the top of the escarpment on the Rift Valley, apparently while the Bishop was bathing in a nearby stream, Livingstone had set a precedent for more active action against this ‘open sore of the world’ and sewn for Mackenzie an idea for a mission institution based on released and converted slaves. The consequences were incalculable but the simple humanitarian act of 18 July 1861 at Mbame doomed the first UMCA mission when, some 60 miles away, it began to construct a settlement and station at Magomero.

Dickinson, Burrup and the two artisans arrived in Mozambique on the east Coast of Africa on 17 August 1861. But Blair was afflicted with tropical ulcers and already too ill to continue, and Dickinson invalided him back to the Cape: he returned later and rejoined at Chibisa’s village.²⁶ The next stage to Quilimane, where all the remaining were sick, took them into October before, on the 12th, the three Europeans entered the River Zambezi under the protection and guidance of a local Portuguese Consul as far as the mouth of the River Shire some 70 miles from the Zambezi Delta.²⁷

Burrup set off alone in a small canoe and ‘natives, of whose language he could not speak a word’.²⁸ His intent was to make contact with the Mission, inform of their arrival and return to meet with Dickinson. On 13 November Burrup had ‘ … the unspeakable pleasure of meeting Dr Livingstone coming down the Shire in his steamer, the Pioneer’.²⁷

This, four days later, was to be the circumstance of Dr Dickinson’s one and only meet with Livingstone, when he in his little canoe came across the Pioneer (Livingstone’s boat) stuck fast on a sandbank. There is unlikely to be much doubt that Dickinson’s sentiments at meeting the living legend were those of Burrup.

Crucially Dickinson, in delivering the latest mail, confirmed that another group was on its way in. The party included Mary Livingstone (Livingstone’s wife), Miss Anne Mackenzie (the Bishop’s sister) and the aforementioned Mrs Burrup.

Dickinson’s news changed the direction of planning. The Bishop, now actively building his Mission in Magomero in the Shire Highlands, and Livingstone on the Pioneer, put priority on the arrival of the ladies and attempted to co-ordinate a meeting of the concerned parties and ships at the mouth of the Zambezi for January 1862.

Dickinson and Clarke continued up river to Chibisa’s Village and disembarked for the walk into Magomero. ‘On the morning of November 29, just as we had finished breakfast, we heard the report of a gun…’ writes Henry Rowley, the Mission schoolmaster: ‘We knew what it meant: Dickinson: Clark and Charles (a South African convert) had arrived – and with letters! For these and all other mercies, but especially for this mercy, God’s holy name be praised! was the Bishop’s thanksgiving, then off we ran to meet the newly arrived. Dickinson looked worn and weary, but Clark was fresh. We first of all had a thanksgiving service for their safe arrival, and then the day was given up to the news from home’.²⁹

Magomero

Magomero had been chosen a year or so earlier by Livingstone when local circumstance and his judgement had suggested that the peninsula of land almost wholly surrounded by the Namadze River, and with a benign local chief, was the perfect defensible place for the development of a Christian mission, preaching the Gospels and acting as a nucleus for a grand commerce-based scheme for growing cotton to compete with that imported to Britain from the slave owning and using New World territories.

Rowley has noted ‘ … we saw, day by day, that we were situated in the most unhealthy place in the whole country’.³⁰ This judgment, taking some account of the changing season and the impending arrival of the ladies, was to a dire situation: the unhealthiness, a reference to the security, provisioning, feeding and isolation as well as its location as susceptible to attack, pestilence and disease. Dr Meller had, in September, while the Mission was awaiting the arrival of its own doctor, dealt with an outbreak of smallpox.³¹ Indeed, when Dr Dickinson arrived the situation was nearing disaster.

Livingstone himself, seeking later to reduce his culpability in the catastrophe of choosing Magomero and just before the death of Dr Dickinson at Chibisa, wrote ‘It was shaded by lofty trees, which the poor Bishop [Mackenzie] admired exceedingly and resolved to preserve. The missionaries failed to prevent these 200 hundred people from depositing their droppings all over a space of less than 100 yards by 50, and it then was fitly described as a “pest hole”’.³²

On ventilation and health grounds Dickinson had immediately advised the clearing away of some of the bush and promptly found himself having to deal with his first emergency – Burrup got the juice of a euphorbia in his eyes and was temporarily blinded.

The local and highland climate did bring respite from the remittent fevers, including his own, that Dickinson had to deal with but these were quickly eclipsed by the morbidities of poor hygiene and sanitation and nutrition. The settlement site far from being easily defended from attack was surrounded by a natural moat into which the ablutions and human detritus entered and flowed to where the drinking water was collected – too late, was this fatal concoction ever to be dealt with!³³

The mission was resourced with barter goods to feed a small expatriate community and Dickinson, with but the wherewithal for a handful of Europeans, had to deal with an ever-increasing population of released slaves to add to the 80 or so dependents as a result of the Livingston-led action at Mbame. Then too, to add to Dickinson’s medical burden, were the other deadly hazards of Africa, animals, insects, plants and snakes: in the latter case he was to gain a considerable reputation, kudos and power after apparently curing a woman of a deadly bite.³⁴

In early December, a famine was developing. By the time Dickinson appreciated that not only sanitation in African villages was non-existent but also that the station was getting drinking water downstream, there was an outbreak of amoebic dysentery to deal with. The boy’s dormitory became Dickinson’s hospital ward – ‘his zeal never flagged, his charity never failed’.³⁵ More than 50 of the original released slaves died.³⁶ ‘And, under God’, wrote Rowley, ‘it was entirely owing to Dickinson that we missionaries did not die also’.³⁷

The Bishop, aware of Livingstone’s concern that the Upper Shire Valley was becoming increasingly dangerous from internecine tribal warfare and the periodic raiding of the martial Angoni and very conscious of the welfare of his sister and Mrs Burrup, was contemplating an alternative way to shepherd them to Magomero. He was considering a passage from the east along the Ruo River which joined the Shire further South and closer to the Zambezi. He set off for Chibisa on 3 January 1862 accompanied by an ailing Burrup to try and rendezvous with Livingstone.

On 14 February Burrup was carried in to Magomero ‘lying on a rough couch slung on a pole’.³⁸ The missionaries, by then living on pumpkins, now heard of the Bishop’s death from fever before he could meet with Livingstone. Burrup, his health utterly destroyed by the ravages of fever, diarrhoea and his ordeal with burying the Bishop, and despite Dickinson’s dedicated devotions, died on February 22 just three months from his arrival in Central Africa, the marker for his grave the only evidence now left at Magomero of the first UMCA attempt at an institution.

Reverend Lovell J Procter, now the Mission acting lead, ordered a phased abandonment of Magomero. The last, and the bulk, of the Mission remnant left on 25 April 1862; Dickinson was not the only one regularly down with fever.³⁹ On 27 April, somewhere far to the Southeast, Mary Livingstone, long suffering wife of David, died.⁴⁰ On 3 May the sorry, bedraggled procession entered Mbame – less than a year from the fateful release of the slaves by Livingstone.

Chibisa’s village

Gelfand writes of this new location ‘little did they realize that they had selected a far worse position than Magomero’.⁴¹ Close to the River Shire, the small band, awaiting a new leader and new direction, established a small settlement and a routine. Dr Dickinson had his own facilities and at times seems contented. But his own record shows that illness, notably fever and dysentery, was constant and his advice, in a written report to Procter, was that a move to a better clime, perhaps back in the mountains, was an urgent priority.^42,43

Dickinson, despite his almost continuous suffering, remained inventive in new ways of making food palatable and found time to train and educate one of the brighter released boy slaves, he in turn becoming an enthusiastic supporter of Dickinson’s interest in Diatomacae and learning to spot a good source, the two apparently often to be found staring down a microscope.⁴⁴ Others collected samples of standing and running water from various places in the area for him to prepare and examine.

Dickinson asked other members of the team for Tsetse fly specimens while on their foraging and other trips; there was some knowledge then that these were associated with fatal illness in cattle. He took pot shots at elephants, tried to eat crocodile meat and, according to Richard Thornton (1838-1863), the Zambezi expedition geologist who died shortly after Dickinson, dealt with a thieving leopard with bait poisoned with arsenic from his pharmacy kit.⁴⁵ On foraging and exploratory trips with his companions, his fluency in Maganja proved useful. He reads the late Bishop’s library introducing him to the works of Pascal: the tenet of the philosophy that ‘sickness is a natural state for Christians’ would have had considerable resonance with the young doctor always infirm and by now developing signs of terminal malaria. There were companionable erudite and intellectual evenings with his clerical companions where, for instance, a tract by Sir David Brewster that had found its way to Chibisa was the basis for discussion of the ‘ridiculous’ work of Charles Darwin.⁴⁶ And he whiled away many hours, often in the mosquito infested marshes, extending his collection of birds, among them ultimately the three syntypes of Falco dickinsoni.

Dickinson’s medical duties kept him busy, his work is unstinting; if he were not well enough to attend, patients were brought to him. His reputation was noised abroad, reaching up the Zambezi; one Portuguese official was keen to travel through lion country from Tete rather than attend Dr Kirk.⁴⁷ He saved the life of a man mauled by an elephant.⁴⁸

By August 1862 the Lower Shire was a scene of catastrophe: drought and starvation threatening all life, the bodies of men, women and children littering the river and getting caught in the paddles of Pioneer; crocodiles were satiated and the missionaries concerned for their own number, notably for Dickinson, who now asked to resign his position and have a replacement sent. The letter survives and indeed was acted on, Dr Waghorn being appointed to succeed him.⁴⁹ A new arrival, Reverend James Stewart writes ‘ … poor Dickenson’s [sic] face and appearance were a sad comment on the unhealthiness of the district’.⁵⁰

However, a false sense of recovery followed in November with some rain falling in the mountains, the river becoming navigable again and the reappearance of goods for trade and fresh meat. Dickinson withdrew his resignation.

At the turn of the New Year the situation was once again parlous; Reverend Henry Scudamore, one of the original missionaries of the UMCA and favourite of Livingstone, finally succumbed to malaria on 1 January and was buried at a site of Dickinson’s choosing on the River Shire. Dickinson wrote of the tragic detail of Scudamore’s death from cellulitis and throat abscesses complicating his fever in a letter that survives.⁵¹

On 8 March 1863 Dickinson was forced to take to his bed; Clark too, one of the artisans, gave cause for concern. Procter sent for urgent assistance from Livingstone, then further South, and once again stuck fast on the ship Pioneer. He and Kirk made a rushed canoe journey but arrived moments too late to see Dickinson alive. On the morning of 17 March Procter sat with him and talked. Dickinson had rallied: ‘I am afraid I am very ill, and shall not get better. I should have liked to return to England and not leave my bones in this land, but if God has ordered it otherwise, it is well and His Will be done’.⁵² Waller administered some ammonia and chloric ether, and Dickinson roused enough to join in some prayers. His last words, spoken half an hour later, have been recorded as ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner’.⁵³

The day after, Dickinson’s actual birthday, Dickinson was laid to rest beside Scudamore. Waller, Kirk, Adam and Blair carried the makeshift coffin (old flour boxes covered in blue cloth). Procter conducted the funeral service and Livingstone closed the ceremony with a few words.⁵⁴ Rowley quotes II Samuel c 1; v 23. ‘Lovely and pleasant in their life, in death they were not divided’.⁵⁵

Dickinson memorabilia

The site of this poignant scene and a shared grave is now marked by a substantial marble cross and plinth: it, like that to Burrup at Magomero and Richard Thornton (1838–1863), the Zambezi Expedition geologist, at Majete, dates from 1915 (Figure 3).⁵⁶

Figure 3.

The grave of Reverend Henry Scudamore and Dr John Dickinson at Chikwawa in 2009. In 2011, as part of the 150-year celebrations of the founding of the UMCA, the site was renovated and re-consecrated.

In his book Rowley made a sketch (the original is among the UMCA papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) of the graves for posterity: it is marked with two neat carved wood crosses.⁵⁷ Remarkably, a photograph in one of the few caches of Dickinson artefacts is labelled ‘graves of Scudamore & Dickinson’. This is undoubtedly a work from the camera of Dr John Kirk and likely his hand that labelled it. It would have been taken within days if not hours of Dickinson’s burial as it clearly predates the published Rowley depiction (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Photograph of the Dickinson and Scudamore graves at Chibisa’s Village (Chikwawa) in 1864. This is undoubtedly the work of Dr John Kirk. (Courtesy: USPG @ Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford).

Dickinson is regarded as Malawi’s first resident doctor.⁵⁸ Years later, Dickinson’s name was to be found in gratitude for a life saved in Chibisa.

A quote from a 1934 history of the Newcastle upon Tyne School of Medicine seems remarkably apt: ‘The history of the College might almost be written around the story of its scholarships, and this would carry us on almost to its present day’.⁵⁹

A memorial card, issued shortly after news of Dickinson’s death reached England, is on record. The surviving missionaries, Rowley and Procter, communicated their condolences to the family in Jarrow but – ‘the sad intelligence of his death are too sacred and confidential to be laid before the eye of strangers’. These missives like nearly all personal and family effects have not been seen since: like much Dickinson material, it is detail that is lost.

By August 1864 the new bird species Falco dickinsoni was proclaimed and by November, one syntype had been donated to the Dickinson family. A stained glass memorial window to Dickinson is without any dating or pictorial record. It was erected in St Paul’s Church, Jarrow, but was destroyed by enemy action in 1940.

Memorial scholarship

In May 1865 a committee was formed to oversee a memorial prize at his alma mater. This and the listed subscribers managed to raise £300.00: the names include the Bishop of Oxford (Samuel Wilberforce), the local MP, Robert Ingham, Reverend Professor Chevalier and many of the worthies of the Durham and Newcastle Medical School as well as a significant sum from the people of Jarrow and, later, a large bequest from his family.

A scholarship was set up and a gold medal fashioned to be awarded to each winner, the first in 1868 to James Murray. The prize, now in the gift of the Department of Surgery of Newcastle University, continues to be awarded; the medal no longer is presented and has not been for many years. The last known, awarded in 1926, was stolen in the 1990s. There is no surviving record of the medal despite its award to several doctors who led distinguished lives and careers: e.g. George Grey Turner and Frederick Pybus: both have left much of their documents and artefacts to accessible collections but not their Dickinson Gold Medals.

A memorial plaque

In 1872 a memorial plaque was unveiled by Dickinson’s mother in the medical school. Probably erected initially in Orchard Street, it was moved twice, ultimately to the George VI Building, and was well known to generations of medical students from 1934 to 1980. It got broken and was for a time lost. Recently it has been found though the surround is in pieces, and the central bust based on the one picture of Dickinson, is in very good condition (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Dickinson’s Memorial Plaque before reconstruction and placement on a new site in the Medical School, Framlington Place, University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 2011.

The issues of Dickinson’s health

Livingstone summarises his recall of Dickinson as ‘ … a very weakly subject but very religious and resolved to brave out the fever which he had perpetually’.⁶⁰

The inevitable 20th century question was the wisdom of this sickly man going off into darkest Africa and is not helped by Livingstone’s summary and rather dismissive comment. To ask, however, is to forget that Britain was as unhealthy and the risks of African exploration not quantified. One of Dickinson’s contemporaries at University died in 1863 of fever acquired in the course of his duties at the hospital not a hundred yards from where they both had trained.

‘The death of a sister, to whom he was affectionately attached, had made a deep impression on him and gave to his whole character an unusual pensiveness and gravity … ’ is comment in a memoir without provenance.⁶¹

Porter has noted that, while at Gilling, Dickinson’s health had deteriorated and he was advised to go to Africa!⁶² Rowley noted in 1867 that ‘in constitution he was most unfitted for our life of privation and hardship’.⁶³ It is not until 1863, just after his death, that Kirk noted that Dickinson ‘seems to have been consumptive and weakly’.⁶⁴

Whatever the nature of Dickinson’s background weak constitution, and only Kirk has raised the subject of a tubercular illness, it was of some concern at his recruitment. Gelfand writes, quoting a UMCA Minute book, ‘ … at its meeting on 6 February, 1861, it was agreed that Dr John Dickinson of Jarrow, Gateshead, was in every respect but one fit to be appointed medical officer to the Mission and was superior to any other candidate. The exception was with regard to his health, about which the medical referees were doubtful’. ‘The latter, however, apparently gave their consent, and Dickinson was appointed (Gelfand)’.⁶⁵

From then on, Dickinson had unremitting assaults on his health. Though it is not specified, the sea journey to Africa would have been an ordeal as it was for nearly all reporters of these early steam trips to the Cape of Good Hope and little better than those by sail and dependent on Trade Winds undertaken by his predecessors. Once in Africa, he developed bad fevers and frequently was laid up. At Quilimane he was laid low for several days before he and Burrup set out on what is reckoned a very heroic trip to join the Mission and, in an open boat, certainly one of the most hazardous and unrelenting for incessant exposure to mosquitoes. On arrival in the highlands of Magomero he clearly was in a bad way but the climate gave some respite from the fevers, only to be replaced by the morbidity of the appalling sanitation, hygiene and starvation levels of nutrition. The various recorders of the evolving tragedy of the first Universities’ Mission to Central Africa note not only Dickinson’s peculiar susceptibility to the illnesses of the climes but also situations that were to make his misery all the worse.

On the susceptibility, there is a very significant Livingstone remark: ‘Obstinate vomiting – had prevented the operation of medicines except calomel – he never could take quinine’ (17 March 1863).⁶⁶ Livingstone’s expedition members usually adhered to his faith in the value of his ‘rousers’. These quinine-containing potions undoubtedly saved many lives: deaths like those of Mackenzie, Burrup and Scudamore occurring when, for some reason, these prophylactic concoctions could not be taken. It would seem that Dickinson had a sensitivity or idiosyncratic reaction to quinine and rarely took it in any form.

Nor was a predisposed, pharmacologically sensitive, malnourished Dickinson and the subject of unremitting fever and dysentery, immune to other debilitations: those noted by the various commentators include leg ulcers, prickly heat, a septic finger, sciatica and most telling of all ‘after vomiting a large stomach worm, he succeeded in extracting from what he at first thought was a continuous boil on his thigh a large maggot nearly an inch long. The thing had buried itself in the skin & there had fed & grown’.⁶⁷ Notwithstanding that some sort of worm infestation related to his father’s business or early Victorian England could have contributed to his history of ill health, malabsorption, protein and iron deficiency from tropically acquired helminths were just more factors to compound Dickinson’s constant miseries as his life drew to a close.

By July 1862 and retrenched at Chibisa, Rowley noted that ‘it was evident to all that to save his life, he ought to return home at the first opportunity’ and shortly after ‘We found Dickinson … more ill than ever. He was suffering from a complication of diseases, which we dreaded would prove fatal’.⁶⁸

What is described in the language of the time as a recurrence of his ‘bilious remittent’ was reckoned by Ransford, a long time colonial medical officer in Central Africa in the 20th century, to be blackwater fever.⁶⁹

Of this there can be no doubt for on 5 August 1862 Dickinson wrote home requesting his recall because ‘This last attack began with severe bleeding from the kidneys during the shivering fit, & gradually lessened in amount after the sweating stage. This occurred three or four times with each shivering fit until the fainting and other symptoms from loss of blood alarmed my friends for my safety. The fever symptoms were mild, having no pain in my head. It is a complication which I believe to be rare in the disease, & I have stated it more fully to you than I would otherwise have done so on account of the medical men connected with the Committee’.⁷⁰ Procter mentions Dickinson developing urinary failure as the illness enters its terminal phase (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Dickinson’s letter, referencing his own ‘blackwater fever’, of 5 August 1862, from Chibisa’s Village (Courtesy: USPG @ Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Oxford).

Though Dr Charles Meller, himself a regular and constant victim of malaria while on the Zambezi expedition and who was absent from Dickinson’s death but present at that of Richard Thornton a few weeks later, was already describing in detail various clinical manifestations of tropical fever, its association with mosquitoes and the responses to quinine treatment; in both his publications on the topic he missed the features of the syndromic that was to acquire the dread epithet ‘blackwater fever’.^71–73

In All Saints’ Church, Helmsley, North Yorkshire is a poignant relic of the Zambezi Expedition. It is a slave stick or ‘goree’. A reprint of the illustration of its use around the necks of slaves accompanies, as does an original letter from Dr David Livingstone. Dated 14 July 1863 and addressed from the Shire Cataracts, he thanks the wife of the Bishop of Cape Town: ‘I feel extremely obliged by your kindness in making such a beautiful Mosquito curtain for me. Beyond a doubt it is the handsomest that ever appeared in this country, and I am a great admirer of the invention: this you will readily believe when I inform you that the greatest and most unaccountable folly of my life was travelling all over this Continent without ever thinking that the pest could be escaped from’.

There can be little doubt that the greatest explorer of the age performed a great service to his expeditions by his insistence of the use of prophylactics containing quinine and a blessing he was never to know the irony of being an enthusiast of a device that not only immeasurably improved the rest of his life in the Tropics but that could have saved the lives of Bishop Charles Mackenzie, Mary Livingstone, the Reverends Henry de Wint Burrup and Henry Scudamore, Richard Thornton and Dr John Dickinson had it been to hand. Such is history!

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The permissions of the Natural History Society of Northumbria and Discovery Museum for Figure 1: and the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Harling House, 47–51, Great Suffolk Street, London SE10BS, custodians of the UMCA papers now housed in Rhodes House, of the Bodleian Library of Oxford for Figures 2, 4 and , to be reproduced, are acknowledged, all with grateful thanks: the same, to quote, to the Vicar and churchwardens, custodians of the Livingstone letter at Helmsley, All Saints Church, Yorkshire, UK.

Author biography

Dr ID Conacher, MD, FFARCS, FRCP(Ed) is a retired NHS consultant anaesthetist. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. He was educated in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) where his father was a colonial medical officer and he came to the UK for further secondary and university education. He was always interested in the life, explorations and death of Dr David Livingstone and has returned periodically to Africa to find the untold stories of the medical officers of his ill-fated Zambezi Expedition (1858–1864).

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