On May 28, 1865, a twelve-year-old clipper ship sailed from Liverpool bound for Patagonia, seven thousand miles away. She had not been designed to carry passengers and was well past her sailing prime. On board were 162 Welsh men, women and children whose traditions and language were being threatened by the anglicization sweeping Wales and whose poverty was driving them to seek a new land.

Mimosa: The Life and Times of the Ship That Sailed to Patagonia is the story of the Mimosa’s construction in Aberdeen by then the foremost shipbuilders of wood clipper ships in the world, Alexander Hall & Sons, the men who owned her, and those who sailed on her. She was part of the most important commercial maritime trades of the nineteenth century: the tea trade, the sugar trade, the cotton trade, and the palm oil trade. She made 27 voyages across the oceans of the world to the most beautiful paradises and to the most desolate, finally ending her sailing days on the mosquito-infested coast of West Africa as a hulk.

She was part, too, of a venture to a little-known part of the world which, against all odds and despite incredible hardships, survived and prospered. In every history, book, and all the correspondence that has been written on the Welsh colony in Patagonia her name is mentioned. She became a symbol of the courage it took to endure the hardships, tragedies and uncertainties encountered in the desolation that was Patagonia and is today the most famous ship in Welsh history.

(Nick Davies, Planet, No. 185, Oct-Nov 2007)
Well researched and imaginatively written, this is a book I could not put down. When I finished it, I wanted to read it again. If the title attracts, the content certainly will not disappoint.

(Paul Quinn, The Mariner’s Mirror, May 2008)
It is of inestimable value to have a complete life history of any ship, and this reviewer knows of no comparable published record for a small, nineteenth-century commercial sailing ship.

(Jeremy Howat, May 2009)
This detailed account has been written by the world’s authority on the history of the Mimosa. Susan Wilkinson has been incredibly thorough in her research and found out details about the ship that no one dreamt still survived.

(Barnes & Noble)
This is a thorough investigation into the story of the Mimosa, the ship that carried the first band of Welsh people to Patagonia. The full story of this vessel is told with a wealth of detail, and the author has displayed scholarship and research of a very high standard.

(Tregolwyn Book Reviews)
Susan Wilkinson’s skills as a non-fiction writer are of the very best. She has researched the ‘life and times’ of the ship Mimosa rigorously, over a long period. As a descendant of the doctor who accompanied the Welsh settlers on their voyage to Patagonia in 1865, she is well placed to do so. However, it is the way she tells the story that makes this a truly remarkable work.

(Richard E. Huws, Gwales)
Susan Wilkinson’s Mimosa is a most welcome addition to the extensive body of literature on the Welsh colony in Patagonia and its focus is entirely different, concentrating primarily, but not entirely, on the ‘life and times of the ship that sailed to Patagonia’ … The author writes with great sensitivity, and the 162 passengers to Patagonia all come alive in her vivid and imaginative description of the various individuals who shared perils, illnesses, births, deaths, burials at sea and all the uncertainties of a journey which took over two months from its departure in Liverpool to disembarkation in a strange and hostile environment in South America, where no sea captain had previously ventured.

(Julie Jones, Merthyr Tydfil)
This book is a biography of a ship. Although it sailed the seas for more than twenty years, the Mimosa is best known for one voyage—the voyage of a group of Welsh to set up a colony in Patagonia. It is a wonderful book with a very readable story.

(Wales Online, 29 March 2013)
A fascinating account of an important chapter of Welsh history.

Arthur Pageitt Greene, the sixth of seven sons, was born in Ireland in 1848. In 1872, after completing his medical studies at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, he went to South America to join his brothers who had settled there and spent the rest of his life in Argentina, interspersed with visits to England and Ireland. In his Recollections, which he wrote towards the end of his life, he described his early years in Argentina as the only doctor in a remote area in the pampas, revalidating his medical diplomas in Buenos Aires that was required of all foreign-trained doctors, his medical posts in rural towns, and later as senior physician at the British Hospital in Buenos Aires, his marriage and births of his children, his grief of losing his youngest brother to tuberculosis. He wrote of violent crimes and revolutions prevalent in his day, of epidemics, diseases, suicides, the ravages of cancer and smallpox that cut swathes through the population, and of his final years before retirement from medicine.

(Dr. John D.C. Emery, The British Hospital, Buenos Aires)
Susan Wilkinson engagingly gives us a historical background of the development of the practice of medicine in Ireland, the description of the geographical and sociological situation of a newly emerging country in Latin America, its countryside and its towns, woven through and around the story of an Irish doctor who chose to practice his profession in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century.

(Dr. Niall Whelehan, Marie Curie Fellow, School of History, Classics and Archeology, University of Edinburgh)
The publication of Arthur Pageitt Greene’s Recollections provides us with an important source for nineteenth-century Irish medical networks and, more broadly, for the history of Irish migration to Argentina. It gives us fascinating and novel insights of a number of aspects of life in the Irish-Argentine community, including health, crime and politics, from the perspective of a doctor who served in rural settlements and in Buenos Aires.

(Irish Medical Times)
Arthur Pageitt Greene was a part of the medical and social history of Argentina and saw history in the making. He lived through political unrest and revolutions, calmly going about his work and extracting bullets and patching up wounds when required to do so or visiting his patients on foot when his horses were expropriated by revolutionary forces.

(Edward Walsh, The Southern Cross, Argentina)
Already known for her two previous books—Sebastian’s Pride and Mimosa: The Life and Times of the Ship that Sailed to Patagonia—this is in a related area but slightly different genre. Dr. Arthur Pageitt Greene’s memoirs takes one on a journey from Kilkea, County Kildare, through medical education in Dublin and Edinburgh, and on to Argentina, learning Spanish, revalidation of his medical qualifications in Buenos Aires and then as physician, initially in the wilds of the Tuyú (in the south of the province of Buenos Aires), followed by time spent in Buenos Aires, the towns of Lobos and Mercedes and in the British Hospital, Buenos Aires. This was an Irish medical doctor, an agnostic dissenter working in a country which was predominantly Roman Catholic.

It is often assumed that the Irish who emigrated to Argentina were all Catholic. This was not the case as in fact there was a fair number of Protestants who left Ireland for Argentina, and this is as yet an unresearched area of Irish Argentine history. Reading is all about the lines that leap off the pages and this book published by The Memoir Club does not disappoint.

(Dr. Kenneth Collins, Editor, Vesalius, University of Glasgow)
This work, describing the career of an Irish doctor in the unfamiliar territory of rural nineteenth-century Argentina makes for fascinating reading. The recollections of Arthur Pageitt Greene, who studied in both Dublin and Edinburgh, bring to life the medical and social conditions of the time and the struggles of a doctor to cope with political instability and the variety of diseases common to the era. As a graduate of two cities at the forefront of Victorian medicine, the Argentine pampas proved to be a challenge of the most demanding sort.

Arthur Pageitt Greene grew up in a large Irish family. Orphaned at an early age, he was dependent on the support of his older brothers. Consequently, following the decision of his older brother Thomas who practiced as a surgeon in the Welsh colony in Patagonia, it was relatively easy for Arthur to make the long journey to the Southern Hemisphere in 1872 and join his brothers in Argentina.

Conditions were primitive in the rural area of the Tuyú where Arthur settled. There were few doctors, and the sick were accustomed to treatment by a variety of local and untrained healers. Infectious diseases were rife. An Irish doctor would have been something of a novelty and would at first been treated with a degree of suspicion. Injuries from violence were common and often turned septic, and the nineteenth century saw many outbreaks of cholera with high levels of mortality. Yellow fever was also endemic, and the death of young children was a frequent occurrence. Clinic and hospice facilities were primitive and basic. This was a prescription for a harsh life for a dedicated young physician.

In 1876 Greene moved to the small city of Mercedes. … Mercedes proved to be Greene’s home until 1912 with a break of nine years based at the British Hospital in Buenos Aires serving the city’s large British expatriate community.

On retirement, he returned to Buenos Aires before settling in England. Susan Wilkinson is to be complimented on her editing of the Recollections, written in Greene’s retirement in England, which convey with startling immediacy a country in medical and social turmoil. Her context and extensive footnotes provide the background for a clear understanding of Greene’s life. Despite spending many retirement years in Kent the lure of Argentina brought him back there in 1930 after completing his memoirs, and he died in Buenos Aires in 1933. This is a memoir that is both informative and a window into an era which was formative both for the writer and his adopted country.

(David Barnwell, ABEI Journal, São Paulo, Brazil)
This interesting book recounts the memoirs of Dr. Arthur Pageitt Greene (1848-1933), a distant relative of the editor.

Wilkinson’s book is a collection of anecdotes taken from Greene’s papers. They constitute a lively portrait of rural Argentine life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is a place where death can come in many forms, suddenly or after drawn-out illnesses, be it by murder, revolution or by minor accidents that can produce fatal complications. Smallpox is rife. Diseases such as anthrax and rabies are common and poorly controlled.

Susan Wilkinson possesses a fine knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century Argentina. Her notes to Greene’s memoirs are particularly useful and expansive. Her description of mid-nineteenth-century Argentina is vivid.

(Dr. Timothy Jackson, BA MB DCH DPH FFPHMI, Specialist in Public Health Medicine – Retired)
This is a delightfully informative work on an Irish doctor’s life in late nineteenth-century Argentina. There is an interesting background on his early life in Ireland and the options for professional training at the time.

Following his brothers, Dr. Greene then arrives in Argentina at a time of immense upheaval and change in both professional and political life. Susan Wilkinson documents this in a most scholarly way, with relevant footnotes throughout, clarifying more obscure details. She lets Dr. Greene speak for himself from his comprehensive diary. She provides valuable comments on the state of public health at the time and the impact of early scientific medicine, often conflicting with traditional healers.

Dr. Greene is seen as dedicated, knowledgeable and caring in the face of huge difficulties. Some of his cases are extreme and astonishing and a timely reminder of how far we have managed to come in our modern age. Susan Wilkinson has written a memorable work, which goes well with her previous works on Argentina.

(Dr. Kevin Kenny, Journal of the Essex Recusant Society, UK.)
Recollections of an Irish Born Doctor in Nineteenth-Century Argentina describes eighty-five years of adventure, professionalism and humanity, largely in Arthur Pageitt Greene’s own voice. The editor, Susan Wilkinson, a descendant of Dr. Greene, uses his written recollections to piece together this narrative of his life. By organising these in chronological order, with each phase preceded by a meticulously researched context and with detailed annotation throughout, Ms. Wilkinson has turned a jigsaw of vignettes into a smooth storyline.

Susan Wilkinson’s work is thorough and well presented. Different stages of Arthur Pageitt Greene’s life are connected with dominant themes such as the political scene, the landscape, or the evolution of medicine and public health. Each phase is entered through a well researched introduction allowing the reader to follow Dr. Greene’s observations in his own words, while understanding the context in which they were written.

The story is about the life of an extraordinary doctor, at a time and place of significant change—political, societal and in the nature of medicine and public health.

This book is a pleasant and informative read. It will be of particular interest to those attracted to any of the particular spheres attaching to Arthur Pageitt Greene, such as Irish emigration, the formation of Argentina or the evolution of medicine. But it also holds general interest as an account of a fascinating life lived fully in interesting times.