Early Life and Missionary Work
White was born in Bowral, New South Wales. After studying medicine at the University of Sydney, he married Mary Bellingham and together they travelled to Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) as Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in 1938, where White established a hospital at Mvumi Mission which soon replaced Kilimatinde as the main medical centre of the CMS mission in Tanganyika.
White succeeded Dr Cyril Wallace as the medical secretary of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika in 1939. He wrote his first book, Doctor of Tanganyika, which is factual and contains many photographs taken by White himself, to illustrate how missionary work was carried out under such primitive settings, with the local Chigogo people. In 1941 after only two years in missionary work White had to return to Australia due to his wife's illness. On the way home, he developed a boil in, to use his own words, 'a place which caused me to take a pillow, cut a hole in it, and sit very carefully (!)' Unable to take part in the shipboard entertainment he started to write. From this came the book Jungle Doctor, the first in an extensive series bearing the same name.
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