Dissenting voices: 1902–1956

Abstract

AbstractThere were a number of medical experts who contested the Chamber’s claims about mine safety. The dissent began after 1910 and stretched well into the apartheid era. The dissenters included Drs John Mitchell, Eustace Cluver and Peter Allan, all at one time senior members of the South African Department of Public Health. There was also Dr A.H. Watt, the medical officer with Rand Insurance; Dr Basil Dormer, the Union’s Chief Tuberculosis Officer; Anthony Mavrogordato of the SAIMR; and Dr Gerrit Schepers, who served as a specialist with the Silicosis Bureau from 1944 until 1954. The dissenters pointed out that dust exposures in the mines and conditions in the compounds were unsafe; that infectious disease, most notably tuberculosis, was being spread from the mines to labour-sending areas; that the conduct of mine medicals was inadequate and was failing to pick up compensable disease; and that mine wages were so low that many families were malnourished. The lone dissenter to voice all of those concerns was Dr Neil Macvicar, who for almost forty years served as a medical missionary in the Eastern Cape. Macvicar, who worked initially in tuberculosis prevention programmes in Scotland, had first-hand knowledge of mine recruiting in Nyasaland. Macvicar’s views about prevention were conventional. He believed that tuberculosis could only be combatted by social change: governments must guarantee food security and promote the education of patients and their families on how to manage the disease.