[Surgeon General] Thomas Heazle Parke
Life
1857-1893; b. Clogher House, Drumsa, Co. Leitrim; ed. RCSI; service in Egypt, 1882 and 1885; involved in Karthoum expedition to rescue Gen. Gordon; later organised expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, governor of Equatorial Africa, for Stanley; unpaid volunteer accompanying Stanley’s expedition, 1887; commanded a company and acted as medical officer; travelled 1,000 miles up the Congo; BMA and Royal Geog. Soc. gold medals; staff of Royal Victoria Hospital; bur. Leitrim; commorated by a statue on the lawn of Leinster House, Dublin. ODNB DIB
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J. B. Lyons, Surgeon-Major Parke’s African Journey 1877-89 (Dublin: Lilliput Press 1994), reviewed by John Spurling in Times Literary Supplement, 9. Sept. 1994), a retelling of Stanley’s expedition from recently discovered diaries and letters of the expedition’s Anglo-Irish doctor; being a practical and prosaic sort of person, the horror takes on a different aspect through his eyes, losing its metaphysical suggestiveness but gaining a noisesome scum of medical detail; his published works were Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa, and Guide to Health in Africa with notes on Country and Inhabitants; Parke was described by Pall Mall Gazette on his return as ‘regular young Apollo’; his writings were ghosted by a Dr. John Knott in Dublin; died suddenly at thirty-five, possibly from tape-worm infestation; Lyons’s sober footnotes praised. Also reviewed by Martin Lynn in Linenhall Review (Autumn 1994), p.34.
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Notes
Portrait: The statue of Parke on Leinster Garden, on front of Natural History Museum, is erroneously calls a statue of Livingstone Oliver St John Gogarty in Not This Time of Year at All.
Kith & Kin? (1): Mungo Park, the African explorer and missionary, is not related but is the subject of a biography by a Stephen Gwynn ( Mungo Park and the Quest for the Niger, London: J Lane 1934); see also Daniel Haughton.
Kith & Kin? (2): Brian Inglis (Downstart, Chatto & Windus 1990), refers to members of the Park family, incl. his own cousin Cecil Mungo Park, a cousin of the author’s mother, in p.34. &c.
Kith & Kin (3): A certain Mungo Park and his wife gave their Irish collection into the keeping of the Princess Grace Irish Library at the time of their divorce [in the 1980s].
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