The Church Missionary Society and modern medicine in Uganda. The life of Sir Albert Cook, K. C. M. G., 1870-1951

modern scientific ideas as the truly great intellectual achievements they are, and perhaps rightly fears their debasement in the new dark churches of irrationalism, and their belittlement by those without the generosity or intellect to comprehend them. He is however, I believe, in the end, wrong. We should be able to see scientific ideas as produced and sustained by bodies ofmen and serving social ends of all sorts, and at the same time value them as inspiring intellectual accomplishements. Otherwise we place them beyond history. Beneath his inauspicious title, The Church Missionary Society and modern medicine in Uganda, W. D. Foster has concealed a remarkable piece of biographical writing. Albert Cook, the child of a middle-class Anglican Victorian family was born in 1870. As a Cambridge undergraduate he was inspired with an evangelical fervour that was to remain with him until his death in 1950. Nearly the whole of his life, between 1896 and his death, was spent as a practising missionary and doctor in Uganda. Though hardly a Boswell, Cook had that same mania for recording in minute detail all the incidents of his life, and, equally important, his reflections upon them. These diaries, plus those of his mother and his almost complete correspondence with her, have provided Foster with the material for an intimately detailed account of a unique aspect of British Colonial life. To begin with the book is an exquisite picture of medical education in late Victorian England, coupled with a voyeuristic intrusion into the daily life of the middle-class drawing room. Cook's mother recorded that they were "anxious to prove Christians can be happy without cards and dancing-we had music, microscopes, chess, fossils, and family prayers". [italics in original] (p. 20). From here the biography slips, appropriately, into a style suited to an Edwardian adventure story. Uganda in the early years of this century was unknown, untamed, impassable, and, above all, highly dangerous. Evangelic inspiration was able to sustain feats of endurance from the first missionaries that almost defy belief. Death from malaria, trypanosomiasis, and typhoid was all too common, as it was from hostile tribesmen. Marches of hundreds of miles across bush and swamp to the sick in mind and body were an everyday occurrence. Somehow or other, though, England was never very far away. "[The] party were entertained to a dinner of zebra soup, fried sardines, antelope rissoles, stewed bustard, roast guinea fowl, …