Jack Penn
We open this Congress with the Jack Penn Keynote Lecture.
But who was Jack Penn?
Jack Penn was born on 14 August 1909, just a stone’s throw from here, in Cape Town. He was the youngest of seven children. After the First World War, his family moved to Johannesburg where he completed his schooling and entered medical school at the age of sixteen.
He qualified as a doctor in 1931 and obtained his Edinburgh fellowship in 1935.
During the Second World War he trained and worked alongside the great pioneers of plastic surgery – Gillies, McIndoe, and others. After the war, he returned to South Africa and established plastic surgery here, becoming the founding figure in this country.
He was also a humanitarian.
- He travelled to Lambaréné, in now Gabon in W Africa, to help Dr Albert Schweitzer at his leper hospital;
- He flew into Israel, cloak and dagger style, under the radar, to help with casualties in the first Arab-Israeli war;
- He went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to help reconstruct the burns of atomic bomb survivors, and while there, was invited to help launch the Japanese Society of Plastic Surgery.
- He was SA’s first professor of plastic surgery at the U of Wits, Jhb.
- Further, he was invited to both sides of the Atlantic numerous times to serve as visiting professor – Oxford, Edinburgh, Pittsburg, LA;
- He was elected as an honorary associate member of the newly formed American Society of plastic and reconstructive surgery, representing Africa and the Middle East
- He sat on the editorial board of the Society’s new journal.
- And in 1956, he helped to found our own Association.
Jack Penn was a gifted surgeon, a talented sculptor, an author, and a pragmatic statesman.
Shortly before his passing in 1996, at the age of 87, we – then young registrars, trainees, at Groote Schuur Hospital – visited him at his home in Clifton.
By his own admission, he was an impatient man, a man of great tenacity and single-mindedness. He had big ideas; respected, but did not fear authority and was not afraid to be outspoken. But he was also a man of genuine kindness, who cared deeply for people and for the world.
In 1985, to honour his extraordinary contributions, our Association established the Jack Penn Lecture. Each year we invite leaders from across disciplines – often beyond plastic surgery – to challenge us to look beyond our immediate field, to seek inspiration and creativity.
Today we will hear his words, his inaugural lecture, that was delivered in 1985. The title is The Philosophy of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The tapestry of the past is woven into our present and guides us into the future.
It is now my great privilege to hand over to his son, John Penn – himself a distinguished plastic surgeon, past president of the American Society, and now retired – to introduce his father.
