Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 35.djvu/165

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Mackenzie
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Mackenzie

a very active part in organising the first 'autumn manoeuvres,' which were held on Dartmoor in the late summer of 1873. Driving out from the camp to dinner at a country house in the neighbourhood, on Sunday, 24 Aug. 1873, Mackenzie and his brother-in-law, Captain Colomb, attempted to ford the little river Meavy, which was flooded with the recent rains, when the horse was swept off his legs, the gig upset, and the occupants with difficulty reached the bank. Mackenzie died immediately afterwards of syncope induced by exhaustion. He left a widow, daughter of Lieutenant-general G. T. Colomb, whom he married in 1861.

[Foster's Baronetage under 'Douglas of Glenbervie;' Monthly and Hart's Army Lists; Kinglake's Crimea, 6th ed. vi. 37, 58, 61, vii. 467; Wolseley's Campaign in China; Times newspaper, 26 Aug. 1873, and Lancet and Army and Navy Gazette, 30 Aug. 1873. Mackenzie was not in the first Afghan war nor one of 'Akhbar's captives,' as stated in the Broad Arrow, 30 Aug. 1873, the officer alluded to being a namesake in the Madras army.]

H. M. C.

MACKENZIE, Sir MORELL (1837–1892), physician, descended from the Scottish family of Mackenzie of Scatwell, in the parish of Contin, Ross-shire, was the eldest son of Stephen Mackenzie, a surgeon. He was born at Leytonstone on 7 July 1837, and was educated at Br. Greig's school in Walthamstow. His father was killed by a fall from his carriage in 1851, and soon afterwards he entered the Union Insurance Office as a clerk, but he quickly resigned the post in order to study medicine at the London Hospital. In 1858 he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and afterwards spent one year at Paris and another in Vienna. In 1859 he visited Czermak at Pesth, and learnt from him the use of the laryngoscope, an instrument invented by Manuel Garcia, the great singing-master, which Czermak was then bringing into clinical use. About the same time Mackenzie spent a few months in Italy. After his return to England he held several of the minor appointments on the staff of the London Hospital, graduating as bachelor of medicine at the London University in 1861, and taking the degree of doctor or medicine in the following year. The Jacksonian prize of the Royal College of Surgeons was awarded to him in 1863 for an essay 'On the Pathology and Treatment of Diseases of the Larynx: the diagnostic indications to include the appearances as seen in the living person.' To this subject he subsequently devoted his whole life. He was appointed assistant physician to the London Hospital on 5 Sept. 1866, and in he became full physician there, a post which he resigned a few months afterwards. In 1863 the Hospital for Diseases of the Throat was founded in King Street, Golden Square, chiefly through his exertions, and in its management he at once took a leading part.

Mackenzie rapidly obtained a large private practice, principally in the treatment of diseases of the throat, but his large practice and repeated attacks of asthma did not prevent him from publishing numerous books and articles. He was the first Englishman who became expert in operations on the larynx and adjacent parts, and his acknowledged eminence in this capacity led to his being called upon in 1887 to attend at Berlin the crown prince of Germany, afterwards the Emperor Frederick HI, who was attacked by cancer in the throat. Endowed by nature with great manipulative skill, constant practice had rendered him a master in the use of the laryngoscope and of the laryngeal forceps; but he was also by nature somewhat indiscreet, and his mind was essentially polemical. In the early stages of a disease so insidious as cancer there are always sufficient grounds to base diametrically opposite views of the cause producing the patient's symptoms. In the case of the emperor, of Germany, Mackenzie chose to take the more hopeful view, stating at the time of his first visit to Berlin that it was impossible to decide on the nature of the disease. The English physician doubtless found on reaching the German court that he was the object of some jealousy, and this feeling was rapidly intensified by the aggressive manner which he assumed in self-defence. The outcome of the relations thus strained was a violent and unseemly quarrel between Mackenzie and his German colleagues, in the course of which insinuations were made entirely unworthy of the high positions held by the contending parties. Professor von Bergmann, one of the chief German surgeons in attendance, retired from the case on 30 April 1888, and on 15 June following the patient died. Mackenzie was so ill-advised as to publish details which should have been kept secret. The German doctors issued a medical account of the illness. Mackenzie replied in a popular work called 'Frederick the Noble,' which appeared in October 1888. It is, however, only just to him to state that the publication of his book was due to representations made to him from influential quarters, representations so strong as to lead him, perhaps against his better judgment, to abandon the purely medical report he had at first projected, and to