Thomas Pringle's call to Dr Kennedy for ‘a little doctoring’ was made the morning after his signing the announcement, from the Aldermanbury office, of the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. That ‘crumb of bread’ going down ‘the wrong throat’ on 27 June 1834 was the beginning of the end.

In January 1833 he was able to tell Dr Philip, at the Cape, that he was ‘generally emerging from my pecuniary distress’ and had ‘got nearly over the embarrassment by Underwood's failure’ – a further financial setback not mentioned elsewhere. He had hoped, ‘if I live a few years longer, of paying off every shilling I owe’. Dr Philip was clearly a major creditor, and Pringle added:

It seems curious, in our time, that a man of only 44 years should foresee the possibility of an early death, though he had complained of the ‘hypochondriasis’ which had long plagued him (this was a term that, as in Boswell's Life of Johnson denoted chronic depression and anxiety, not simply morbid fears about one's health). Interesting too that the schoolmaster-turned-journalist John Fairbairn was already concerned with the quite unrelated activity which led to his founding, a dozen years later, one of South Africa's major corporations, the internationally stock-exchange quoted ‘Old Mutual’ life insurance company.