On retirement, and after doing a project on drug resistant tuberculosis for Medecin Sans Frontiere in Armenia, he returned to Central Africa in search of the medical doctors connected to the Zambezi Expedition (1858 – 1864), led by Dr David Livingstone. 

In this book, the focus is on one from Tyneside, Dr John Dickinson, whose medical training was the progenitor of that received by doctors of the 20th C: a model of medical education, based on schools of anatomy, that survived late into the 20th C. As the first generation of those born in the 21st C become today's undergraduates, the link to this harsh Victorian and religious past is forgotten and superseded by the paradigms based on the computer and mobile phone. 

 The harshness of the conditions and mores of Victorian Britain had many parallels with the experience of growing up in Colonial Africa. And, a University education in post-2nd WW UK producing those charged with modelling and advancing the new National Health Service, founded the year of Dr Conacher’s birth, reflects much of its morality and social thinking. 

The return to Africa, after nearly a half century of absence, to find the man Dr John Dickinson who died there, revealed the dilemmas now faced by doctors by the huge increases in population; and the contrast in a destroyed natural world, to which these Victorian doctors, with their training in Galenic Theory and pre Darwinist ideas, had, in its pristine state, dedicated most of their effort and for which they are remembered in eponymous species they discovered.