Why I Did Not Become A Surgeon

From my early teens, my dad spent time counseling me on my choice of profession. At an early age, I had the mind to study law. I joined the debating society in school as a preparatory step. In my last two years in school, I was the number one choice to represent my school in inter-schools' debates. It happened that in 1953, during the masquerade festival in our locality in Abeokuta, a city in Nigeria, a lorry driver knocked down a masquerade. The accident occurred at a T-junction where our house was located. The accident victim was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. It was on a Sunday evening.

The driver engaged the services of my brother, who was practicing as a lawyer in Lagos, but came home for the weekend. As it happened, the case came before my dad on Monday. To my horror, it was thrown out on technical grounds the following day. Technical grounds my foot; we all witnessed the commotion that greeted the manslaughter event. I challenged my brother to explain to me why a culprit should be allowed to go scot-free. He told me with pride that the victim was not identified at the site of the accident as a mask usually covered the face of a masquerade. The prosecution was unable to establish the identity of the accident victim in court. He therefore sized the opportunity to submit that his client had no case to answer.

Two things disturbed me. I accused however mildly, my dad and my brother of partisanship or favoritism. Both denied anything of the sort. Secondly, I could not understand why a guilty person should be allowed to go scot-free. However, the legal minds told me that until proved, he was not guilty. The effect on my life was immediate. If that was part of the things a lawyer would be paid for, I should not like to become one.

My choice of profession shifted to medicine. I decided to become a surgeon. The biology syllabus of the Cambridge School Certificate Exam at that time demanded that a student should dissect a frog, study and draw the internal organs. I approached the period with excited expectation. This was about three years after I abandoned the law profession. Frog was in good supply. So it was you to your frog. During the class, I considered it cruel to apply chloroform to knock the frog out. A classmate did it for me. With the frog still visibly breathing, I pinned the ends of the four limbs to the board, with the underside up. Using the surgical blade, I slit the frog's belly open. As I did so, blood trickled out. I could not take it. I ran out, and failed to submit any report. That put paid to my ambition to become a surgeon. I immediately regarded medical doctors hard hearted, wondering how they had the nerve to cut human beings up.

At the end of my second year in the high school, I privately went through the algebra and geometry syllabi for the school-leaving Cambridge Exam. While still in school, I flirted with making a profession out of chemistry; but I considered it not mathematical enough. After I left school, I looked at engineering as it was suggested to me at the Science School. The endless engineering drawings put me off. I settled for physics because I found it more challenging than merely applying formulae to solve problems.