My father lived 20 more years than the Bible’s allotted three score years and ten, and reluctantly retired from his popular diabetic practice at the Netcare Parklands Hospital in Durban, four years ago at the age of 86. Now that the aftershock of his departure is slowly easing, I thought it fitting to reflect on his life and legacy.
Two months ago, on 25 October, my father Dr Leslie Ivan Robertson, fondly known as Dr Mac, DocMac, Mac, Papa and Dad, ended his long journey on Earth. Fortified with his two Pfizer vaccines, he managed to dodge Alpha and Delta, but not his final nemesis, a stroke.
This recollection of my father’s life is not told just by me, one of the flawed first drafters of history, but in collaboration with him, through his own oral and written reflections, other family members, colleagues and patients whose lives he affected.Born on 20 April 1931 to Maude and William Robertson, at 40 Chatham Road, Salt River, Cape Town, Leslie Ivan Robertson was nicknamed Mac by his cousins after a character in a comic strip called.
It was not Kies, but Mac’s working-class father who urged him to become a doctor. As they could not afford the fees, he had to work all his holidays in the furniture factories where his father, a French polisher, was employed. He also served as a wine waiter at the posh New Orleans Club for many weekends and he was paid to paint lines on the legs of young women from his neighbourhood who could not afford stockings.
After a few years of learning to be a paediatrician at McCord, Mac started a medical practice in the Durban suburb of Sydenham. Quite soon after this he was able to fulfill his promise to help save people suffering from tuberculosis when he became a part-time medical superintendent at the FOSA TB settlement.
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