Rhodes Cottage Museum

This guide to Rhodes Cottage Museum in Cape Town follows the mysterious ailment that shadowed Cecil Rhodes for three decades: fainting spells, blue lips and heart attacks that baffled Victorian doctors even as he built a diamond empire and a colony that took his name. It settles on 1901, when his physician, Leander Starr Jameson, chasing whatever breeze came off False Bay, ordered a hole cut straight through the cottage wall. Rhodes had bought this modest seaside cottage two years earlier, preferring its small rooms to the grand house he owned across the mountain.