My Personal Experiences In Equatorial Africa As Medical Officer Of The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Parke, Thomas Heazle.

First edition. During the expedition, Parke, the group's doctor, saved many of his fellow men from illness, starvation, and wounds, including Henry Morton Stanley, the expedition's leader. His detailed account, in large part transcribed verbatim from his journals, acknowledges the controversy which greeted Stanley on his return to London. Parke (1857-1893), an Irish-born physician, joined the Egyptian Army in 1881 and served in the Tel el-Kebir campaign the following year. He became director of the Army Cholera Hospital at Helwan, south of Cairo, in 1883 and in 1885 led the naval brigade at Abu Klea, an engagement in the expedition to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. He was living quietly in Alexandria when Stanley, passing through, recruited him as a medical officer for the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. His account concludes by "saying farewell to a leader whose sagacious forethought and unflinching determination carried us through a series of difficulties which, I believe, no other living man would have been able to battle with so successfully" (p. 512). Howgego IV S60. Octavo (225 x 155 mm). Recent green half morocco, red spine label lettered in gilt, spine with raised bands, compartments elaborately blind-stamped, marbled boards, brown coated endpapers. Wood-engraved frontispiece, 16 similar plates, large folding colour map in end pocket as issued, 32 pp. advertisements at end. Minor foxing and finger soiling to outer leaves and edges, offsetting from sometime-removed paper to pp. 482-3, folding map splitting along folds. A very good copy.