Health Biographies of Alexander Leeper, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Stevenson eBook

After completing high school I was offered a scholarship to study optometry at Melbourne university, and turned it down. About three years later I applied for, and was offered scholarships by three different organisations to study a course called “Group Work” at the South Australian Institute of Technology. I accepted one from the Australian Commonwealth Government and proceeded to complete it part time in four years.

I later became interested in health problems and wrote some articles about them for the Australasian Nurses Journal.

Toward the end of that period the head of the South Australian Institute for Fitness Research and Training invited me to design a program to study the relationship between exercise and fatigue, and it proceeded until the objectives were achieved.

I subsequently became interested in the history of medicine, and in that process read several biographies about Robert Louis Stevenson. They seemed to interpret his health problems as if the circumstances of the nineteenth century were the same as they are now, so I decided to write his biography myself to put it in the relevant perspective, but with the advantage of modern knowledge.

The main photo on the cover was taken from inside the home of Robert Louis Stevenson and was provided by James S. Winegar, President of The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, International. When I posted him some copies of the book he sent me the following reply . . . "The Minister of Youth Sports and Culture in Samoa loves the book. We presented him with a copy and he devoured it."