Home taught for abroad: the training of the Cape doctor, 1807-1910

Given that the Cape (or for that matter South Africa) did not have a full medical school until 1920, all Cape doctors before then were trained outside of Africa, the vast majority in Britain and Continental Europe. Accordingly, this chapter examines the kind of training they received in these countries, as this fundamentally shaped the kind of medicine they subsequently practised at the Cape. It concludes by exploring why medical training was so slow to develop at the Cape, and what the long-term effects of this were on these medical schools and their curricula.