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This is the original version of a story first published in 1920 about a medical doctor with a remarkable ability: He can talk to and understand animals. This gets him into trouble with his human patients. Because he keeps some of his animals in his office, his patients leave him. Dr. Dolittle starts treating animals, when they get sick.
Dr. Dolittle has no money, because all of his patients have left him. He learns that there is a serious illness among the monkeys in Africa. The monkeys will all die and only Dr. Dolittle knows how to save him. So, Dr. Dolittle must go to Africa.
Although Dr. Dolittle has no money, a man loans him a small boat so he can sail to Africa. He can only take a few of his animals with him. Upon arriving in Africa, the king there immediately puts Doctor Dolittle in prison.
The king's son, Prince Bumpo, has heard the Story of Sleeping Beauty. The Prince Bumpo wants to kiss sleeping beauty to wake her up. However, he fears that Sleeping Beauty will reject him because he is Black. The animals tell the king's son that Dr. Dolittle has the power to change his skin from Black to White so that the Sleeping Beauty will accept him. Therefore, the king's son decides to get Dr. Dolittle out of jail so that Dr. Dolittle can change his skin from Black to White.
About the author
Hugh John Lofting (1886 - 1947) was an English author trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children's literature character of Doctor Dolittle. It first appeared in illustrated letters to his children written by Lofting from the British Army trenches in World War I.
Hugh Lofting's character Doctor John Dolittle, an English physician from Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in the West Country, who could speak to animals, first saw light in the author's illustrated letters to children, written from the trenches during the 1914-1918 War, when actual news, he later said, was either too horrible or too dull. The stories are set in early Victorian England in the 1820s-1840s (The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle gives a date of 1839). He was living in Killingworth, Connecticut, while he wrote most of the instalments to the series.
The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed (1920) began the series and won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. The sequel The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922) won Lofting the prestigious Newbery Medal. Eight more books followed, and after Lofting's death two more appeared, composed of short previously unpublished pieces.
