Mackie showed an early interest in anatomy. Family legend has it that when the family dog died, he boiled it up in a huge cauldron on the vicarage lawn until the bones came loose so that he could take them out and dry them and reassemble the dog as a skeleton. He received his early education at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and his basic medical training at the University of Bristol Medical School and St Bartholomew's Hospital. London. His exceptional ability was quickly recognized. As Saunders scholar (1897) and silver medallist at Bristol General Hospital, he completed his final exams in 1898 and was immediately appointed to a position as Casualty Officer and House Physician. During this time, in December 1898, he published his first of some 85 scientific papers, “Notes on a Case of Blackwater Fever” in The Lancet. A year later he was Junior Medical Officer at County Medical Asylum in Shrewsbury, and then spent 18 months as Superintendent at the Bristol City Isolation Hospital at Ham Green. He entered the Indian Medical Service (I.M.S.), passing out in first place in 1902, aged 27, with a gold medal in medicine. Later in his career he added the F.R.C.P and the F.R.C.S as well as the D.P.H to his professional qualifications.
