Why didn’t I become a surgeon?

Since my teens, my father spent time advising me on my choice of profession. At a young age, I had the mind to study law. I joined the debating society at school as a preparatory step. In my last two years at school, I was the number one choice to represent my school in inter-school debates. It so happened that in 1953, during the masquerade party in our town of Abeokuta, a city in Nigeria, a masquerade was run over by a trucker. The accident occurred at a T-junction where our house was located. The accident victim was pronounced dead upon her arrival at the hospital. It was a Sunday night.

The driver hired the services of my brother, who was practicing as a lawyer in Lagos, but he returned home at the weekend. He just so happened that the case came before my father on Monday. To my horror, he was dropped for technical reasons the next day. Technical bases my foot; We all witnessed the commotion that greeted the manslaughter event. I challenged my brother to explain to me why a guilty person should be allowed to go unpunished. He proudly told me that the victim was not identified at the scene of the accident as a mask usually covered the face for a masquerade. The prosecution was unable to establish the identity of the accident victim in court. Therefore, he took the opportunity to present that his client had no case to answer.

Two things disturbed me. I accused, however slightly, my father and my brother of partisanship or favoritism. Both denied anything of the sort. Second, he couldn’t understand why a guilty person should go unpunished. However, the legal minds told me that until proven, he was not guilty. The effect on my life was immediate. If that were part of the things a lawyer would be paid to do, I wouldn’t want to become one.

My choice of profession changed to medicine. I decided to be a surgeon. The Cambridge School Certificate Examination biology syllabus at the time called for a student to dissect a frog, study and draw the internal organs. I approached the period with excited anticipation. This was about three years after I left the legal profession. Frog was in good supply. So you went to your frog. During class, I considered it cruel to apply chloroform to knock out the frog. A classmate did it for me. With the frog still visibly breathing, I nailed the ends of all four limbs to the board, bottoms up. Using the surgical blade, I cut open the belly of the frog. As he did so, blood dripped. I couldn’t stand it. I ran out and couldn’t send any report. That put an end to my ambition to become a surgeon. I immediately looked at the doctors with a heavy heart, wondering how they had the nerve to cut up human beings.

At the end of my second year in high school, I privately passed the algebra and geometry programs for the Cambridge exam. When I was still in school, I flirted with making a career out of chemistry; but I considered it not mathematical enough. After leaving school, I looked at engineering as suggested in the School of Science. The endless engineering drawings put me off. I settled for physics because I found it more challenging than just applying formulas to solve problems.