My father Maurice King, who has died aged 97, was a doctor and writer who devoted most of his career to improving medical care for the world’s poor.
He was teaching at the University of Makerere in Uganda in 1965 when he filled in for a sick missionary doctor at a hospital in Amudat in the country’s remote north-east. He found himself unprepared for the patients he saw, and realised no written resources existed to help him. It was, he wrote, “an empty space on the bookshelves of the world … that badly wanted filling”.
He convened a conference of experts and collected their knowledge together into the book Medical Care in Developing Countries (1966), a “primer on the medicine of poverty”. In a simple, easy-to-read form, it told a non-specialist practitioner how to organise clinics and treat any number of complex conditions with the resources available in remote places such as Amudat.
It had a huge impact, was translated and reprinted multiple times, and sold over 50,000 copies.
