by Professor Emeritus Sir Henry Fraser
Arthur Rudolph Edghill, CBE, MBBS, FRCS, has been a household name in Barbados for the past fifty years and more. He has been a surgeon without peer, operating first at the St. Joseph Hospital in St. Peter, briefly in the Diagnostic Clinic / Hospital, and then at “his baby” The Bayview Hospital, which he conceived, supervised, delivered and chaired its operations for almost a decade.
His passing on Thursday, June 9, leaves family, numerous friends and hundreds of colleagues and even more patients, to mourn a most valuable and much appreciated life. Arthur was born on February 1, 1937 – a year of national significance for Barbados, and his birth was one of great significance for health care in Barbados.
He was the second son in the large Edghill family of St. Philip, with an older brother Eddy, solicitor, four younger brothers and one sister. Like his brothers he attended The Lodge School where, like almost every Lodge boy, he naturally acquired a nickname, and because he was shorter than his older brother and brother number 3, he earned the sobriquet “Runt”. This perhaps motivated him to excel in everything he did, both at sports and academically.
He was one of the annual scholarship winners taught by our famous biology teacher Mr. Herbert “Wox” Gooding, winning a UCWI scholarship in 1957 and proceeding to the then University College of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica to study medicine. His brother Winston followed in scholarship, winning a prized Barbados Scholarship the following year and proceeding to Edinburgh University to study medicine as well.
Arthur was top of his class, winning medical prizes, honours and distinctions in most subjects, and graduating with Honours and the Gold Medal in his year in 1962. He completed his internship at the old Barbados General Hospital and went on to a career in surgery.
He returned to Jamaica as registrar at the University College Hospital and then obtained his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. As a passionate and personable teacher he was hugely admired by medical students, and it was expected that he would settle into an academic (teaching) post at the University College Hospital.
But that was not to be. He was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship which took him to the University of Edinburgh, the long-standing centre for medical training for most Barbadian doctors, for further surgical training and the award of the FRCS. It was a huge loss to the university but a huge gain to health care in Barbados.
He returned home to the post of Senior Registrar at the new QEH until 1969. He then established a clinical consulting practice first at Shoppers Centre, Black Rock, and later at the Diagnostic Clinic.
He operated first at the St. Joseph Hospital, and became the Chief of Staff there. When sadly, the St. Joseph Hospital closed in 1985, he joined with other colleagues to operate in the old operating theatres used by Sir Jack Leacock many years earlier, at the Diagnostic Clinic.
But they rapidly outgrew the Diagnostic Clinic and created the Bayview Hospital, on the site of Bay Cottage, once the home of Dr. Harry Bayley, founder of the Diagnostic Clinic next door. Arthur monitored the plans, the birth and delivery of the hospital and chaired its board of management from its opening in 1989 until 1997, when he retired as chairman and was replaced by Dr. Charlie Edwards.
His vision was expressed in the mission statement of the Bayview: “Our focus is centred on the care of our patients; this ensures that they are provided with the very best treatment and recovery protocols. With our unparalleled standard of patient services, including our 24 hour on-call support provided by our senior house officers, we aim to offer the best for the patients.”
Arthur had a strong sense of community and the importance of giving back. He was extremely proud of the general practice he operated once a week for several years in St. Phillip at his birth place, Well House, where he held office one day a week. Most of those whom he saw were from the community he grew up with, and he never charged. He described this as one of the most rewarding aspects of his medical career.
Arthur was one of the very first doctors to introduce modern IT approaches in his clinical practice, and I recall inviting him to give a paper at one of our Continuing Medical Education conferences, where he made it seem so simple and so obvious an approach! I understand he was also the first surgeon to perform laparoscopic surgery in Barbados, with the laparoscopic cholecystectomy (i.e. removing the inflamed gall bladder through a very tiny incision). And he gave papers at local and regional conferences on his extensive surgical experience.
He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2004 for his services to medicine, which went far beyond his surgical skills, as member of Council of the Medical Association, of the Barbados Medical Council and of other organisations.
He was one of those born teachers who loved to share and was generous with his advice at all levels, with colleagues, family, patients and friends. And he was very much a family man, while his wife Maureen was a skilled shell artist. They were both artists – he with people and she with shells.
Our hearts go out to his sons Roger and Dean, for the loss of a wonderful son of the soil; he did his very best for everyone. May he rest in peace.
