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.
In the following decades Maurice lived in Zambia, Indonesia and Kenya, working with experts to produce books on nutrition, primary child care, mother care, surgery and anaesthesia for developing countries.
The story was that some of the books were purchased by British surgeons in brown paper bags, keen to have the information but embarrassed to be seen with books intended for the developing world.
In 1970, while living in Zambia, Maurice married Felicity Savage, also a doctor, who later co-authored the book Primary Child Care (1978).
Maurice’s last job was at the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Leeds, which he joined in 1985, and where he continued working on his books until his retirement in 1992.
He knew that war and environmental degradation were among the most serious threats to the health of the world. His book Primary Surgery, published in 1987 during the cold war, included a prayer for peace in English and Russian, and called on doctors to play their role in opposing nuclear war.
In 1993 he was made a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a rare honour for someone who had performed only one operation on a patient.
The son of a colonial forestry officer, Christopher King, and his wife, Eleanor (nee De Winton), Maurice was born in Hatton, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). While his parents lived abroad, he was sent to boarding school in Britain. At Uppingham school in Rutland, he discovered his love of making things – particularly furniture. He then studied medicine at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and St Thomas’s hospital in London.
He is survived by Felicity and me, and by three grandchildren. My brother, Dominic, predeceased him.
