Tropic of Cancer

Like many a lesser light in his profession, British Laryngologist Morell Mackenzie "had a harmless liking for seeing his name in the newspapers." So when he was summoned to Berlin, in 1887, to examine the troublesome larynx of Crown Prince Frederick--heir to the throne of Germany--Dr. Mackenzie saw to it that the imperial summons appeared in the Court Circular of the London Times. Six months later, the royal patient was dead--and the world's newspapers boiled the unfortunate Mackenzie in one of the spiciest, most scandalous stories of the 19th Century.

British readers are now able to learn the facts of this long-forgotten but fascinating episode in Anglo-German relations in a book (R. Scott Stevenson's Morell Mackenzie, Heinemann; 155.) which has created a considerable stir in England. The story of the "father of British laryngology" has been exhumed by Laryngologist R. Scott Stevenson (a distant cousin to famed Robert Louis).

The day when Mackenzie inserted his laryngologist's mirror into the . Crown Prince's throat was, Author Stevenson insists, "a turning-point in European history." It was obviously to any patriotic Englishman's advantage to cure the patient. Crown Prince Frederick, who was married to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, was an Anglophile and a liberal. His senile father, Kaiser Wilhelm I, was a militarist, hand-in-glove with his ruthless Junker Chancellor Bismarck. Equally militaristic and Anglophobe was the Crown Prince's own son & heir--the peacock-proud youth with a withered arm who was one day to lead Germany against Britain in World War I.

British and German liberals shared one passionate hope--that kindly Crown Prince Frederick would soon mount the throne and refashion the German state on the lines of the British constitution. When Germany's leading physicians agreed that the Crown Prince was suffering from cancer of the throat, and demanded an immediate operation, liberal hopes in both countries fell.

Self-assured Dr. Mackenzie defied his German colleagues, arguing that an operation would almost certainly be fatal. Peremptorily, he bundled the ailing Prince off to the Mackenzie clinic in England, and cut out the growth on the larynx in a minor operation. Soon, Crown Prince Frederick felt like a new man. Queen Victoria delightedly invited Dr. Mackenzie to lunch and knighted him after the dessert and coffee. In the spring of 1888 the Crown Prince ascended the throne as Kaiser; three months later he was dead--cancer of the throat.

Virulent Defense, Bitter Death. The storm that burst over Mackenzie's head was devastating. Outraged German doctors declared that, through personal vanity and ignorant egotism, he had virtually murdered their monarch. Bismarckian newspapers (secretly delighted by the fate of the liberal Emperor) charged Mackenzie with being a tool of British foreign policy; he had refused to diagnose cancer, they argued, for fear that the Crown Prince would be declared incapable of succeeding to the throne. Mackenzie retorted in pamphlets so virulent that even his best professional friends hung their heads in shame. About four years later, Mackenzie died, a broken, embittered man.

Biographer Stevenson does not deny that Sir Morell Mackenzie was a vain, bad-tempered man. But he insists that Mackenzie's medical conduct was irreproachably sensible. By acting as he did, Mackenzie at least prolonged his patient's life, where a drastic operation might have been fatal. Reason: there is good cause to believe, says Stevenson, that the royal cancer was fatally aggravated by syphilis --caught by the Crown Prince in his younger days from a beautiful Spanish woman, while attending the opening of the Suez Canal. No German doctor cared to admit the presence of syphilis--and Mackenzie himself denied the fact out of "loyalty" to Queen Victoria and her daughter, and passed the secret on only to one close friend.

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