T o get to Groote Schuur Hospital, one must at least travel some way on Cape Towns Main Road, which runs between the two original enclaves of European settlement at the Cape the Castle of Good Hope, built by the East India Company to defend its stake at the tip of the continent, and the naval base at Simons Town, which gave Britains Royal Navy supremacy in southern waters for a very long time.
The hospital complex, built on Cecil John Rhodess former estate, looms over the noisy road, its classical faade of Corinthian columns and Grecian urns amplified by Devils Peak.
When I arrive at 5pm, the benches outside the original hospital building, which are typically packed with patients, stand empty, and the late leavers among the staff are filing out of electronic access gates, making for their transport. A security guard with time on his hands offers to escort me to the elevators, down a hallway I had last walked 20 years before on a visit to The Heart of Cape Town Museum , which commemorates Christiaan Barnards 1967 achievement of what was then the holy grail of surgery: the heart transplant.
