Doctor to Basuto, Boer & Briton 1877-1906. Memoirs of Dr. Henry Taylor by Taylor, Henry (author), and Peter Hadley (editor)

(Cape Town: David Philip, 1972) 0949968064. 8vo; original red boards, lettered in gilt on spine; dustwrapper; pp. xii + (vi) + 213, incl. index; plates. Dustwrapper a touch rubbed; gift inscription to front free endpaper. Very good condition. "Living among both [the Basuto, and the Dutch in the Orange Free State] he adopted the maxim 'Put yourself in his place before passing judgement upon him'. This attitude is central to any subsequent appraisal one makes of the book's worth as a guide to the life and times it recounts. Mythology, which so frequently masquerades as history, is not Dr. Taylor's line. He neither gilds the lily nor indulges in vulgar prejudice. Though there is a certain degree of the old man's typical nostalgia for the prelapsarian innocence of the past - particularly in his idyllic description of the Leribe when he arrived there in 1877 - generally he describes with a clinical impartiality what he himself experienced and tried to comprehend. The tolerance brought to bear on understanding the bucolic community of the Eastern Free State, whose virtues and shortcomings equally stemmed from the isolation of their rural life, also seeks to understand the idiosyncracies of individuals. He is amused but never contemptuous. Even the pompous, drunken quack who fleeced his patients is charitably if floridly despatched: 'May the Recording Angel put his good deeds against his delinquencies and balance the books in his favour.' And the small intimate details - the huisapotheek, the Chief Molapo sending to the O.F.S. for £10 of biscuits - receive equal mention with the alarms of the Gun and South African Wars." - From the Preface by Edna Bradlow. .