Archibald Douglas Pringle, medical practitioner, was the son
of Robert Pears Pringle and his wife Martha Eliza, born Botha. He grew up in the
Eastern Cape and studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland,
where he qualified as Bachelor of Medicine (MB) and Bachelor in Surgery (ChB)
in 1904. Upon his return to South Africa he was appointed in October 1904 as assistant
medical officer at the Government Asylum in Pietermaritzburg (later the Pietermaritzburg
Mental Hospital), under Dr James Hyslop*. He was registered to practice medicine
in the Colony of Natal that same year. In 1906 and 1907 he published two papers
on individual psychiatric patients in the British
Journal of Psychiatry.
While he remained in Natal, Pringle registered to practice
medicine in the Transvaal in 1911. In 1916 he was awarded the degree Doctor of
Medicine (MD) by the University of Aberdeen, with a thesis entitled A contribution to the study of the Bantu
race (Zulus) in Natal, with reference to (1) their mode of living, racial
customs and social conditions and (2) their physical and mental diseases.
That same year he moved to the Witwatersrand, where he worked at the Simmer and
Jack Mine for a while and in 1917 became medical superintendent of the Sprinkell
Miners' Phthisis Sanatorium, maintained by the Chamber of Mines at
Modderfontein, near Johannesburg. The next year his career was interrupted for
a while by the last phase of World War 1 (1914-1918), when he was attached to
the South African Military Hospital at Abbeville, France.
Back at Sprinkell after the war Pringle became an authority on
tuberculosis. His publications on the subject included the following papers: 'Pulmonary
tuberculosis in South Africa: Its prevalence, treatment and economic influence'
(Journal of the Medical Association of
South Africa, 1930, Vol. 4, pp. 453-456); 'Tuberculosis in native employees
of the gold mining industry (Rand)' (British
Journal of Tuberculosis, 1937, Vol. 31(3), pp. 136-140); and 'The care and
after-care of the tuberculous among the European mining population of the Rand'
(Ibid, 1937, Vol. 31(3), pp.
144-149). He remained at Sprinkell until his retirement in 1945, when he was
succeeded as superintendent by his son, Maurice Archibald Pringle.
Pringle married Lucy Isobel Heslop, with whom he had four
sons and a daughter. She became a mental patient and after their divorce in
1943 he married Dorothy Elsie Burridge, but had no further children.
