Introduction

Of all the doctors KM consulted during her short life, Dr Victor Edgar Sorapure was the one she trusted and admired above all others. Having first been introduced to him by her friend Anne Estelle Rice in September 1918, KM wrote to her on 13 January 1919, talking of her ‘new doctor’, and relating the story of his unpromising start in life: ‘Hes a wonderful man – He was a doorstep baby, left in Paris with nothing but a shawl on and a paper pinned on his poor little chest with SORAPURE written on it. That is what he calls himself’ (see above, p. 490).

From such unpromising beginnings, Dr Sorapure soon rose to a position of prominence in his chosen field of medicine. After an education in Kingston, Jamaica, at St George’s Jesuit College, he obtained his medical degree in 1899 at the University of Edinburgh and undertook postgraduate work at St Andrews, before returning to Kingston as Chief Surgeon at the Government Hospital. He then moved to New York, where he was appointed to the Chair of Clinical Medicine at Fordham University. As his obituary in the British Medical Journal notes, ‘He brought to his duties there a clinical insight, fortified by an extensive acquaintance with the literature, and a capacity for precise and accurate detail that made him as a clinical teacher always learned, always interesting, sometimes illuminating.’ When World War One broke out, he moved to London and worked as a consultant at Hampstead General Hospital, before opening a practice in Wimpole Street, where he was highly valued and respected by his patients and, more widely, within the medical profession. His obituary remarks how ‘It has been said, and with a certain justice, that no patient ever left him, save for geographical reasons. Sorapure was a man of outstanding character, personality, and intellect.’ He himself died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-nine. Characteristically, ‘His ill-health was the result of infection contracted during a bout of strenuous work, and aggravated by neglect of his own health in favour of what he conceived to be his duty.’

From all of the above, it is clear that KM was lucky to find in Sorapure an intellect coupled with a generosity of spirit, as well as a spiritual understanding of the world, that guided her health and tuberculosis treatment for the last four years of her life.