Meet Kenya’s weird colonial-era doctors

Kakamega County MP Elsie Muhanda gives a herbal medicine concoction to residents at Shamiloli area in Kakamega East on April 13, 2020. [Benjamin Sakwa, Standard]

The Covid-19 pandemic has pounded the globe for two years and in its wake came numerous supposed cures and remedies, some unorthodox.

In Kenya, the price of lemon went up at the onset of the pandemic, while various steaming methods were promoted globally. Some suggested that people swallow hand sanitiser, gladly, no one tried it.

But if you think such quirky treatments only came about during the pandemic, you need to look back at Kenya’s medical history at the turn of the 20th Century when the profession was largely in the hands of foreigners. Three doctors come to mind with their out-of-this-world prescriptions.

Dr Roland Burkitt was an Irishman who started his practice in 1911. Settler mothers were certain that if their children caught the slightest fever, they would surely die of pneumonia. Writing in the book, Under the Sun, J W Gregory relates a mother’s experience: “Dr Burkitt placed [the child] naked in an open-work basket, which he hung on the doorway and sprayed it with a watering can. Unable to stand it any longer she rushed from the scene of what she was convinced was murder and locked herself in a bedroom from where she showered threats on Dr Burkitt’s head.”

The remedy worked and the child’s fever disappeared. In other instances, Dr Burkitt would make patients ride on the back of his pick-up truck to lower their temperature.

Then there was Dr Ayres Ribeiro, Kenya’s first private medical doctor who used to ride around in a tame zebra. His malaria cure, which he patented and sold to international firms, consisted of grey powder that induced severe vomiting of bile but that had his patients assured of good health thereafter. It was Dr Ribeiro who diagnosed the famous bubonic plague in Nairobi in 1902. Local health authorities ordered that the Indian Bazaar be burned to the ground and Dr Ribeiro lost his business.

But perhaps the most eccentric was Dr John Gilks who kept a tame leopard and tagged it along as he visited his patients. Locals called the leopard “Starpit”, but only because they had difficulties deciphering the doctor’s orders to the leopard, “stop it, stop it.” What the doctor failed to accomplish, the cat did with ease. It was said patients would get instantly cured by sheer fright as the leopard jumped onto the bed.

Despite their unconventional methods, the trio was described as Nairobi’s best-known, best-loved, and certainly, most-dreaded medical doctors.