A. Yale Massey

Career Alfred Yale Massey graduated with his B.A. from Victoria College in 1893 and taught for a year at Wiarton. He went on to earn his M.D., C.M. in 1898 from Trinity Medical College. Both later became part of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. Massey was described as a "beloved physician" and credited with building the first hospital in Bié Province.

It was a period of political turmoil, danger and unrest in Portuguese Angola. The Portuguese government permitted "contract labour" - which Massey described as "a legal term - really slaves". He sent a set of slave shackles home to Canada, that had been left behind by a dealer's caravan.

The marriage of Dr. Alfred Yale Massey and Miss Ella Margaret Arnoldi occurred on either December 7, 1902 or December 9, 1902, Born in Walton, Lean, England on April 27, 1879, Arnoldi was a registered nurse. She is listed as embarking from Montreal on June 21, 1902, and arriving at Benguela on October 10, 1902, two months before their wedding.

Company doctor

Massey worked as a company doctor for the Tanganyika Concessions Company and Union Minière du Haut-Katanga in the Katanga Province. In 1905, Massey reported the presence of sleeping sickness among Baluba porters who had been recruited to work from the Bukama Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sleeping sickness was a devastating fatal disease that would not be treated successfully until 1920, when Louise Pearce tested arsenic-based drugs.

In 1906 and 1907, Yale Massey mapped the occurrence of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) and the distribution of the riverine tsetse fly Glossina palpalis and savannah tsetse fly Glossina morsitans in the Belgian Congo, Africa. His maps showed that the disease was spreading along the banks of rivers. He reported the new occurrence of the disease in the Upper Congo in The Lancet.

Chief Medical Officer As of 1908 Massey was reported to be practicing medicine of the ear, eye, nose and throat in St. John's, Newfoundland. Subsequently, Massey studied at University College Hospital in London, receiving his Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery of the Society of Apothecaries (L.M.S.S.A.Lond.) in 1913.

Massey enlisted during World War I and served with the rank of Major in the Belgian Congo Medical Service of the Belgian Army. He was stationed at Coquihatville Hospital in the Belgian Congo.

Throughout his career, Massey continued to study, treat and write about infectious and tropical diseases such as encephalitis, onyalai, and tuberculosis, becoming highly regarded. and sent specimens of ticks to members of the London School of Tropical Medicine. At least one species has been named after him.

Massey was also an amateur photographer, whose photographs appear in the autobiography of naturalist Cuthbert Christy.

Massey died on August 22, 1922, in Irebu, Coquilhatville, Belgian Congo.