Surgeon Major Parke's African journey 1887–89

people's health that would tell of a simple shift "from the Poor Law to the National Health Service". By the time of the Great War, a huge and intricate fabric of services was in place, of various kinds, funded by diverse sources, and tailored for differing sectors of society with distinct conditions and needs. One of the great works of the NHS lay not in creating services but in systematizing them and removing the elements of arbitrariness and class deference. Finally, every page of Model mothers reminds us (we should, in truth, not need reminding any longer) of the irreducible localism and extraordinary heterogeneity of health provision. If the Stepney workhouse was generous with medicines, or the Whitechapel guardians provided kosher food in their infirmary, or if home helps were provided in Bethnal Green, you could be sure that things were arranged quite otherwise in Mile End or Limehouse. Not the least pleasure of this rich and rewarding book is to be brought face-to-face time and again with the exceptionally personal and variegated nature of metropolitan medical, nursing and hygiene services. Something like community care did exist, because those were the days of fiercely defined local communities with identities of their own. The support systems depicted in Michael Young and Peter Willmott's classic Family and kinship in east London (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957) existed no less for the sustaining of health than for the upholding of family and cultural bonds. Thomas Heazle Parke was a twenty-nine year old military surgeon of modest achievement when, in 1887, he persuaded the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to let him join the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. By the time of his death seven years later, Parke was one of the best known Irishmen of his day; hailed variously as "the man who saved Stanley" and "the first Irishman to cross Africa". Although the reputation of Stanley and other members of the expedition was soon tarnished by stories of atrocities and incompetence, Parke's remained relatively intact. He had stood aside from the mud-slinging which had broken out between members of the expedition, and had attempted to dampen the controversy through the publication of an anodyne account of his experiences in equatorial Africa, which also did much to restore Stanley's reputation. In this fascinating if disturbing biography of Parke, Dr Lyons presents a quite different account of Parke's journey into the "Heart of Darkness", …