Text of a talk given at University College Hospital. London: Gilliat Lecture Theatre, Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG on 29 October 2024, a celebration of the life and achievements of Dr James Samuel Risien Russell (1863-1939). My thanks to Helen Burgess and her colleagues of UCH.

The African American actor Ira Aldridge presented an English text version of the 1840s French play The Black Doctor, a slavery-focus performance which was quite popular. The words “black doctor” were also used, as the century aged, to describe a fishing lure, the name of a race horse, and moves in the game of draughts. There were also comic playlets, presented by black-face minstrels, generally farces. In medical terms the words were used to describe dark-skinned medical men – of African or Asian descent – including those who were not qualified under the 1858 Medical Act but worked in the far from rare world of herbalism, when nostrums were purchased by those who could not afford the fees of professional doctors.

In this confused world there is evidence that some “black doctors” were popular in their locality. Ethens de Tomanzie (sometimes Ethene, sometimes Tomanzi) was from Burma and his career included being elected to the council in Derry, working in Liverpool (where he died in 1886), and being accused of murder (his acquittal was cheered in the court in Chester – see the Liverpool Mercury of 12 December 1885, page 7 and the Derry Journal of 5 February 1886, page 7).

I first heard Risien Russell’s name when discussing the life of Jamaica-born, London Hospital-qualified Dr James Jackson Brown (1882-1953) with his son Leslie (born 1909). I had been interested in contrasting the lives of two African-Caribbean medical practitioners in Britain – the Trinidadian staunch Catholic Dr John Alcindor who worked in Paddington where he died in 1924, and Dr Brown, a free-thinker active in Hackney who died in 1953.

             

            There were other West Indian doctors in London, for Britain’s tropical colonies had no medical schools and those wishing to be doctors had to study in Canada, Ireland or Britain – US qualifications were not well regarded. Private funds and scholarships encouraged this. A decent education in one of the elitist schools in the colonies, or at a boarding school in Britain, provided the background. Studies in medical schools took years – the students often worked in junior roles in the hospitals (the future Dr Brown was the assistant to Bertrand Dawson, physician to the British royal family and the future Lord Dawson of Penn). Risien Russell and his brother William came from British Guiana and attended Dollar Academy in Scotland from 1880. He then studied medicine at Edinburgh University from 1882 to 1886.

            Edinburgh’s medical school trained ten Scots out of every fifteen students, three others from within Britain, and two from further afield (such as Risien Russell). He qualified in 1886, added an MRCP in 1891, a gold-medal winning MD in 1893, and a BMA scholarship in 1895 which led to studies in Paris and Berlin. His first hospital appointment was in Nottingham, which was followed by work at the tuberculosis hospital in Brompton and at St Thomas’s (both in London). He then worked for University College Hospital.

            He was a thoroughly respected and leading member of the British medical profession. He opened the neurological section of the BMA’s July 1910 conference, speaking on epileptics. He was often a witness in legal cases involving lunacy, notably Harnett v. Bond (1924-5), and chaired the National Society for Lunacy Law Reform in the 1920s. Macdonald Critchley his house physician from 1923 recalled his “dark skin” and thought “he was one of the most important and colourful figures within the medical profession of Great Britain” (The Ventricle of Memory, New York, 1990). Eight research articles by 1893 had doubled by 1908; he also contributed to reference works, notably on nervous disorders in Allbutt and Rolleston’s System of Medicine. Dr. Russell’s war work was mainly connected with the treatment of shell shock in London. He was a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1912.

            Dinner parties with a small string orchestra, a Constable painting on the wall, and a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce car, Risien Russell was a solid professional in London for four decades. A 1960 study of the National Hospital where he also taught described him as “of mixed racial stock” with a private practice comprising, unusually, of “a large proportion of chronic psychotics and psycho-neurotics” (Queen Square and the National Hospital 1860-1960, pages 100-101). This includes a portrait photograph (also published in his obituary, The Lancet, 1 April 1939, page 790) and a group photograph of 20+ men taken in 1906.

            His eldest brother ran the family enterprises in Guiana, William was a barrister who worked in colonial Zimbabwe (and died in 1915), and Gordon was a civil engineer.

            The medical services in Britain’s tropical empire had government-funded health services as well as often substantial charity hospitals (as in Britain). There were independent black doctors, notably Dr. George Busby in colonial Ghana, but for those who, like Risien Russell, had spent most of their formative years in Britain, the colonies were not attractive. The Scotland-qualified Jamaican Dr. Hopetoun E. Bond, who made a study of pellagra (vitamin deficiency leading to dementia), was constantly rejected by the officials of the Kingston (Jamaica) lunatic asylum and so returned to Britain where he practiced in London until his death aged 60 in 1939. The well-connected 1930s abortionist Dr Edward Seyes Massiah of Brighton returned to the Caribbean without a stain on his professional record.

            The decades of work in Banstead by the American Dr. George Rice only emerged when a house clearer of African descent noticed, following his daughter’s death in 1967. Another African American doctor was William Powell of Liverpool who qualified in 1857-1858 (LM, Dublin 1857; MRCS, England 1858) and worked as a house surgeon at St Anne’s District Hospital, Liverpool and on a temporary basis at the Liverpool South Hospital. He then served in a Washington DC hospital for black soldiers in the US civil war. He died in Liverpool in 1916.

            Theophilus Edward Samuel Scholes was born in Jamaica in the 1850s and travelled widely including Panama, the Congo, Nigeria, Belgium, and Britain. He first studied to be a Baptist minister in London in 1878-1880. He studied medicine in Scotland. He took an MD degree in Brussels in 1893. He had a number of books published in London, these including Sugar and the West Indies of 1897; British Empire and Alliances or Britain’s Duty to her Colonies and Subject Races of 1899; Glimpses of the Ages Or the `Superior’ and `Inferior’ Races, So-called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History of 1905 and a second volume in 1908. These books, and discussions with him in London where he was to be found in the reading room of the British Library, influenced a younger generation of black nationalists.

            Another much-travelled black doctor was Hastings Kamuzu Banda, born 1898 and president of Malawi from 1964 to 1994. Banda laboured in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, made his way to the USA and studied at Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, graduating in 1937. This qualification was not recognised by the colonial government so Banda went to Edinburgh with either a colonial government loan or the sponsorship of a white patron, and qualified in 1941. He worked in the Newcastle area, moved to post-war London, where he purchased a practice in Willesden. It is said that when he entered the waiting room the patients would stand up, showing respect. He became involved in Nyasaland matters (as colonial Malawi was called) and became president, after first settling in 1951 in the Gold Coast. Banda ran a one-party state amid growing concerns about misuse of government and national wealth with Wikipedia’s summary saying Banda acquired $320 million. He was overthrown in 1994, and died in 1997.

            Guy Errington Kerr, a Jamaican trained in New York and London, is almost unknown. The American entertainer Alberta Hunter lived in London in the late 1920s, living in a large house owned by singer-entrepreneur John Payne who was an unofficial US ambassador for black Americans in inter-war England. Another of the lodgers was Guy Errington Kerr, recalled in Hunter’s biography as “a violinist who was studying medicine.” I mentioned black medical students to Josephine Harreld Love, whose father had been the tutor and admirer of American musician-composer Edmund Jenkins who, in 1914, started studies for seven years at the Royal Academy of Music in London and whose biography I had written in 1982. Mrs Love (born 1914) made contact for she had been brought up on stories of Jenkins’s musicianship. We became friends and I stayed with her in Detroit and she with me in England. One of her Atlanta college friends had married a Jamaican-born doctor who lived in suburban London, and she showed me a photograph. This was Gertrude Gamlin: Mrs Errington Kerr.

            Picking up the threads led me to discover that Dr. Kerr had died at 2 Wickham Avenue, Cheam (Surrey) on 21 March 1984 and left £132,102. His wife had died in the spring of 1981. Most of his adult life had been spent in England – in suburban London. Dr. Kerr’s musical career had included radio broadcasts for the BBC in 1947 and 1950. He had been a conscientious objector during the war: he seems to have served in a medical capacity.

            Perhaps Dr. Kerr had no contacts with what might be termed the British black community – just like Dr. George Rice who worked in nearby Cheam. That was also close to Epsom where Dr. Sydney Gun-Munro (1916-2007) worked after qualifying at King’s College, London in 1942. He had been a Grenada island scholar and was to be the Governor-General of St Vincent. His older brother Dr. Cecil (1904-1959) had also attended King’s College.

            Time for one more black doctor – Albert Kagwa, from Uganda. He was fifteen when he came to London in 1929 where he studied in Catford then studied medicine at the London Hospital where he graduated in 1942. He is reported as a house physician at the Isle of Wight Co Hospital (Isle of Wight County Press, 29 May 1943, p1).  He was commissioned Lieutenant (no. 318382) Supplement to the London Gazette, 27 June 1944, p 3025, then he shipped off to Burma.  In 1946 the Daily Mirror, 9 May 1946, p 3, reported that he would march with the East African troops in the victory parade in London. 

            Few of us would look at the Isle of Wight’s hospitals to find a black doctor during World War Two.

            Thousands of British people were in contact with black doctors – in hospitals, private practice, in social events especially cricket – whose activities, as this paper has attempted to show, were extremely varied.

            Black medical personnel were not exempt from official bigotry in Britain. The British Hospitals Association (founded 1884), an enterprise which provided 500 nurses to hospitals in the 1900s is known to have followed a colour bar seen in reports of the British Hospitals Association meeting in London in July 1915. The problem of the “shortage of resident medical officers in the voluntary institutions” was raised and it was suggested that a solution would be “that the ‘colour bar’ should be removed” – and the number of female doctors should be increased. This report in the Nottingham Journal (31 July 1915, page 8) was repeated in the Western Mail (31 July 1915, page 6), the Manchester Courier (31 July 1915, page 8) and the Shoreditch Observer (6 August 1915, page 3).

            This kaleidoscope of black medical practitioners reinforces the view that James Samuel Risien Russell was an excellent and reputable doctor. A person who deserves our respect – which today’s gathering represents.

            Thanks for listening.

Jeffrey Green

17 October 2024