Memory of Old Lusaka (The Doctor)

From Great North Road

By: Joe Behrens

Although medical and dental services were primitive in the early years, they sufficed under the circumstances.

Dr. Denis Fabian was the only private Practitioner then. He had no nurse assisting in his surgery. Dr. Fabian was well known in the commercial and farming community as an expert in dealing with malaria and black-water fever. He would spend hours at any time, day or night, sitting with his patients and attended to them in the critical stages.

He treated me for malaria a number of times. When I felt the symptoms appearing, going to work on my motorbike, I called on him in his room at the Grand Hotel, got my injection and carried on to work. He always requested to be paid in cash, which he then kept in a steel-safe under his bed.

Dr. Fabian was keen in doing minor surgical work but was never attended by a nurse. He removed my tonsils, whilst I was sitting on an ordinary chair in his surgery, not having warned me beforehand not to have any food. The moment he gave me a local anesthetic, I brought up my lunch. He then started surgery and came to a stage where I had to assist him in holding some of the instruments dangling out of my mouth. During the surgery his spotlight on his forehead failed, and I had to repair it for him (free of charge). Finally, an hour later, he inserted his podgy hand into my mouth, pressing his thumb into to the hollows where the tonsils had been to stop the bleeding. He suggested a ten minute rest on his couch thereafter and send me off to drive myself home.

On another occasion I suffered from severe toothache and as our only resident dentist, Mr. Roper, was away, Dr. Fabian volunteered to extract the offending wisdom tooth. He only had one extractor instrument available. The tooth broke into pieces and it took him an hour and a number of painkilling injections before he suggested that he also had to remove the adjacent tooth in order to be able to extract the pieces left in the jaw. I did not agree to that and after battling for another half-hour, he finally succeeded to clear it all.

With all this practice and experience I understand Dr. Fabian became a well-known and reputed surgeon in Canada.

A few years later I had to have another wisdom-tooth extracted. At that time Rodney Malcomson, MLC, had his dental practice right next to the Corner Bar, where he spent most of his free time. I landed up without the tooth but with a fractured jaw and lock-jaw.

The old Lusaka Hospital was not properly mosquito proofed and most patients in hospital for non-malarial conditions usually finished up being infected with malaria.

Nevertheless, one survived!