Medical and Healthcare in the pre-Independence era

Thoughts & Reflections

By Dr R Neerunjun Gopee

Reports of violence against doctors and other health personnel take me back to the couple of decades before our independence when I was growing up, a time when doctors were held in high respect. Their very presence, imbued as they were with the latest knowledge that was available then and combined with their experience, almost commanded trust and inspired quiet assurance. But there were other practitioners too, those who made ‘passe’ to treat, for example, some skin lesions or who recommended plants that had healing properties. But such plants were known to many families too, who grew them in their yard. Our own garden had many of them.

Besides, there were nurses, male and female, who went around doing dressings, giving injections recommended by doctors, even treating minor injuries and puncturing boils and abscesses. They belonged to particular localities and rendered their services as and when, charging for example, Rs 1.00 for an injection. Big money in those days!

As far as doctors go, mostly in my family, we resorted to well-known general practitioners in Curepipe, and I do not remember that anyone ever attended hospital, the only one we knew about being Candos or Victoria Hospital, mostly referred to as Candos. We’d heard about Civil Hospital and Brown Sequard Hospital – l’hopital fou’ – where someone we knew had to be taken to for suddenly behaving and speaking very oddly.

There was also ‘l’Hopital Mangalkhan’, set up after World War II for the treatment of polio cases, an epidemic of the disease having occurred during the closing years of the war. Much later in my career as a doctor I not only worked as a specialist at PMOC but also met the English surgeon who had been sent to run the polio hospital and had worked there from 1947 to 1949.

My earliest remembrance of ‘treatment’ was what systematically happened during the August school holidays, the administration of the purgative known as botrice whose smell made us recoil. But there was no running away for any of us children from swallowing that sickly sweet-bitter mixture of l’huile ricin and coffee, which we did with Mother or Dadi squeezing our noses tight and that we had to gulp fast. To neutralise the offensive taste in our mouth, we were given pastilles limon – disc-like cent-size lemon lozenges, which we used to buy at 4 for one cent.

The next torture was swallowing bouillon brede chouchou after each trip to the toilet, of the bucket type that was in the yard, until the urge had stopped by the evening, and we had a dinner of khichri. We were told that the botrice was for cleaning our bowels, since worm infestation was rife as we used to go about barefoot when playing on the bare earth, and in fact it was not unusual to pass worms in the stools.

The variety of medicinal plants in our garden sufficed to take care of the common ailments, and obviously our elders had a good empirical knowledge about them. All of them had a very pleasant but distinctive aromatic smell (and I had to wait until Organic Chemistry in HSC to learn what aromatic compounds were made up of), and equally nice taste, so we had no reluctance sipping hot infusions of them, often while sitting around a coal fire burning in the rechaud on winter evenings. Ayapana was a standard remedy for abdominal pain, camomille serving the same purpose for toddlers in particular. A combination of la verveine and patte poule took care of the common cold and the stuffed noses and sore throat it was associated with. If we had itchy skin lesions, we boiled feuilles chandelle in the water we would use to take our weekly full bath on Sundays; on the other days we cleansed ourselves daily with cold water from the single tap we had in the yard.Read More… Become a Subscriber

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 7 March 2025