Publisher's red cloth binding with silver titles on the spine.
254pp + 5 plates. Book is clean internally. Top and bottom edge of the boards shelf rubbed. Jacket price clipped with age-associated wear.
'The author spent thirty-five years in Africa and got to know over 100,000 Africans. With an absolute indifference to wealth or position he became a mine medical officer at first in the Transvaal, but his surgery was to take him farther afield to the Belgian Congo, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast.
There was adventure in this calling, with numerous unusual cases: snake bites, injuries from crocodiles, lions and lightning, as well as plenty of traumatic surgery - fractures and lacerated wounds, head injuries and stab wounds, and ruptures. Michael Vane's book is not wholly for the doctor or the surgeon; its story is lucid and exciting and goes beyond the operating theatre deep into the strange dark land of medicine men, thunder swears, illicit diamond digging and liquor brewing, of African nurses, ancestor worship and pygmies.
Concerned with humans, their joys and sorrows, strength and weakness, and oblivious to his own advancement, Michael Vane has written a friendly, intimate and highly significant study of the coloured peoples of Africa.'
- Jacket Condition: Fair to Good
- Binding Condition: Good
