The good doctor
A pioneer doctor from Germany used traditional Ma¯ori remedies on his patients, writes Tina White.
Scene: a hotel lounge in Palmerston North, 1890s. The bearded, distinguishedlooking older doctor was having a quiet drink with his adult son, when his gaze wandered to a faded woman tending the bar.
There was something familiar about her. Suddenly, the memory came back, and his pulse began to race.
He was back that night long ago on the West Coast, when a wildeyed man grabbed him, demanding his help.
He pictured again the long horseback ride through the bush, ending up at a rough hut in a clearing. A woman, bleeding from a head wound, lay on the bed.
‘‘If she dies,’’ the man said, ‘‘you won’t leave this place alive.’’
The young doctor with the strong German accent did save the woman, and shakily made his way home as the sun rose.
The woman at the bar was that same long-ago patient. What was her story? He didn’t wait to find out.
Dr Johann Friedrich Rockstroh was born in Prussia, the son of an army officer, in the 1830s.
He studied medicine on a scholarship. During a time when the German government required all young men, even doctors, to spend several years in the army, Johann slipped out of the country, to France.
Later he got a job as ship’s doctor on a botanical expedition to the South Pacific. The ship doubled as a whaling vessel, but ran aground at the Kerguelen Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean, marooning the crew for months.
Johann experimented with grasses until he found one that was fit to eat, staving off starvation until a rescue boat took them to Hobart, Tasmania.
From there the young doctor found his way to New Zealand, first to Gabriel’s Gully, and then Westport. While there, he Anglicised his name to John Frederick Rockstrow.
Marriage followed in 1867, after he met a vivacious young Englishwoman, Anna Gapper, and married her at the Westport registry office.
The first of their eight children was a boy, named John after his father.
Following a year of refresher medical study in Germany, it was back to Westport and a stint at the Buller Hospital; and a bit of goldmining which didn’t pan out.
In 1873, Sir William Fox, then the government’s interim leader, appointed Dr Rockstrow medical officer to Ma¯ ori in Manawatu¯ , Horowhenua and Rangitikei – an enormous area with many remote homes.
During his tenure Rockstrow learned about traditional Ma¯ ori remedies, and used some of them himself.
The family lived in the seaside town of Foxton, where the doctor was also the local surgeon, coroner, Justice of the Peace and vaccinator. In 1886, after they moved to Palmerston North, he was also chairman of the Manawatu¯ county council.
A taiaha (spear), a gift from his Ma¯ ori patients, hung on the wall of his surgery’s waiting room. Next to it was a picture of Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the German Empire; some of his Danish immigrant patients would turn this picture to the wall when they came in for appointments.
Rockstrow didn’t mind. He just turned it back when they left.
Many years later, when descendants and others tried to trace the doctor’s early life in Prussia, they found it difficult to pin down his exact medical qualifications.
In New Zealand, he had refused to sit the required examination for foreign doctors, thinking it ‘‘insulting’’.
So, being unregistered, he couldn’t legally sue any patient for non-payment.
Some people, hearing about this, took advantage of it.
However, in practice, his medical competence was never in any doubt.
He became a local character, as he strode about in top hat and frock-coat; his kindness was legendary – so much so that he would give away his own coat to a beggar, or raid his adult children’s wardrobes to clothe the needy. Patients knew he would accept produce as payment if they had no money.
Time passed. Dr Rockstrow became a grandfather, and retired. He spent most fine afternoons sitting on the veranda of his Palmerston North home, wearing a tasselled, black-velvet smoking cap embroidered with roses and forgetme-nots, and smoking a Ma¯ ori carved pipe.
He died in 1913 of a stroke, at the age of 78.