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Name: JEWELL, Norman Parsons OBE, MC (Dr.)

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Birth Date: 27 Sep 1885 Larne, Co. Antrim, Ireland

Death Date: 30 Aug 1973 Pinner

Nationality: Irish

First Date: 1913

Profession: Member of EAP Medical Service, MO i/c Nbi. European Hospital. President of Nondescripts RFC. He did much to build up the club standard and spirit. He seldom missed a match and instituted the presentation of Honours Caps.

Area: Nairobi, Mombasa, retired to Pinner, 1914 Kisumu

Married: At Mahé, Seychelles 14 Aug 1911 Sydney Elizabeth Auchinbeck b.18 Apr 1884 Dublin, d. 1 June 1970 Harrow

Children: John Hugh Auchinleck (11 June 1912 Mahe-25 Jan 2011 Stockcross, Berks.); Norman Limbury (24 Oct 1913 Mahe-17 Aug 2004 Richmond, Surrey); Norah Beatrice (McCartney) (8 Feb 1915 Mahe-12 Mar 1947 Holborn); Daphne Rhoda Elizabeth (Woolnough) (11 Oct 1921 Mombasa-2 Jan 2019)

Author: On Call in Africa in War and Peace, 2016

Book Reference: Gillett, Nondies, Irish, KAD, Red 25, Red 31, Hut, Curtis, Red 22, Gazette, Dominion, Rugby, Red 19, Norman Parsons Jewell, On Call in Africa in War and Peace

War Service: WW1 Capt. EA Medical Service, OC No 3 EA Field Ambulance

School: St Andrew's College and Trinity College Dublin; MD, BCh, BAO, BA (Dublin)

General Information:

Irish - Left Ireland in 1910 to join the Colonial Medical Service in the Seychelles. When WW1 broke out in 1914 he sailed for Mombasa and enlisted as a medical officer in the forces. His first posting was to Kisumu then Mombasa, and then to Bura in the Taita Hills, quite near the present Ngulia Lodge. There he was to meet up with the 25th Royal Fusiliers who were commanded by the famous Col. Jerry Driscoll and also Frederick Courtney Selous who was at that time the best known game hunter in Africa. ........ President of the Irish Society in 1931. He was by then M.O. in charge of Nairobi European Hospital. ...…
He was born in Larne, Co. Antrim in 1885, educated at St. Andrews College and Trinity College, Dublin. He became Asst. MO and JP in the Seychelles in 1910. After his service with the EAMR during WW1, he became Medical Officer in charge of the Nairobi European Hospital and resided in Nairobi for many years until he retired. His son, John, was born in the Seychelles and after qualifying as a doctor at Trinity College, Dublin, served with the R.V.V.R. and later was a surgeon in British Guiana. John returned to live and work in Mombasa and write "Dhows at Mombasa" and "Mombasa the Friendly Town".
KAD 1922 - Senior Medical Officer, Mombasa
Red 25 - Doctor in Charge, European Hospital, Mombasa
Gazette - 11/8/1915 - Appt. - EA Medical Service - To be Captain - Dr. Norman Parsons Jewell
Dominion - Resident Surgical Officer, European Hospital, Nairobi - 1930
Rugby - Nondescripts RFC - President - 1928-31. Vice-Pres. of Mombasa RU Club 1924.
Gazette - 3/12/1919 - Register of Voters - Rift Valley Area - Dr. N.P. Jewell - Medical Officer - Nakuru
Red Book 1919 - Medical Officer, EA Protectorate 1918 - MO, Kisumu
Old Africa - 18-12-16 - Christine Nicholls - From 1920 onwards Norman Jewell was in charge of the establishment, and his letters and diaries show us what medical hazards were faced by Mombasa’s inhabitants in the 1920s. Jewell had begun his tropical medical career in the Seychelles, but on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he was appointed to the East Africa Protectorate and became an army doctor. He travelled with the troops all over Tanganyika, often working under appalling circumstances. It must have been a relief for him to have been posted to Mombasa after the war.
Jewell found there was a high standard of hygiene and health control in Mombasa, overseen by Dr Henry Speldewinde de Boer. To prevent plague, there were daily autopsies on rats, enabling Jewell to be forewarned should plague occur. Rat-catching was carried out assiduously. And food inspections and mosquito control were energetically pursued. Yet there were unforeseen hazards such as ten inches of rain in a few hours, which burst the pipes and flooded the streets, uprooted trees and washed boats from the harbour.
Then there was an outbreak of smallpox in Mombasa in 1925. Jewell made vaccination compulsory for all, and the only European who died had washed off the vaccine. Over 230,000 people were vaccinated. There were many cases among the African population of the disfiguring yaws, an infection of skin, bones and joints caused by a spirochete bacterium. The sufferers were injected with neosalvarsan as a treatment. But the high cost of this and other medicine was always a problem, and it was with relief that it was discovered by a Kenya doctor that bismuth, at only a penny a dose, achieved the same result as neosalvarsan. Gradually Jewell won over the Africans to accept surgery, and operations for cataract became popular. But the government did not supply the spectacles that were needed subsequently, so Jewell bought these (as well as peg legs for amputees) out of his own pocket.
In 1925 Jewell was transferred to Nairobi and its European Hospital next to the Arboretum and Government House. Now he had a good operating theatre, a fully equipped X-ray room (but without anyone to operate the equipment). There was a good medical laboratory in Nairobi in the charge of Dr William H. Kauntze. It was most useful in diagnosing cases of bilharzia, caused by a water-borne parasite working through the skin to the organs. Typhus was also prevalent. Kauntze and Jewell collaborated on a book published in 1932 – Handbook of Tropical Fevers.
There were at the time racial barriers to the appointment of doctors. Jewell was assisted by African medical orderlies and technicians, and Indian dispensers and sub-assistant surgeons. To get to medical cases he used the railway as the speediest and most efficient sort of transport, often sitting on the footplate or in the guard’s van. He was sorry that in 1932 government retrenchment released him from his duties and he returned to England. His son John H.A. Jewell was to return to Kenya in 1956 and become well known on the Kenya coast as a general surgeon and medical officer for thirty years, at the Mombasa Hospital. He was also a skilled photographer, as demonstrated in his Dhows at Mombasa (1969), written after he had haunted the Old Port for many years, enquiring about Arab dhows, carpets and chests. His book Mombasa the Friendly Town was published in 1976, followed by Mombasa and the Kenya Coast (1987). John’s daughter Sandra also worked at the Mombasa Hospital, as a single-handed radiographer, being the third of the Jewell generations to be associated with the hospital.
For more details of Norman Jewell’s life, see his On Call in Africa in War and Peace, 1910-1932 (2016) and for more about the role of Africans in the medical service, see John Iliffe, East African Doctors (1998). For Indian doctors, see Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala, Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895-1940: The Forgotten History (2015).

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