My father, Michael King, who has died aged 88, always wanted to be a doctor, following a childhood incident when he accidentally killed a squirrel with his catapult to which he attributed his lifelong commitment to surgery and medicine. He worked for three decades as a surgeon in Malawi.
Michael was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where his father, Leslie, was vicar of Holy Trinity, Jesmond; his mother, Rosina (nee Stanton), had worked in Liberty’s in London before her marriage. During the second world war the family were living in Anerley, south London, and Michael went to Dulwich College prep school followed by Hereford Cathedral school.
After national service in Hong Kong, he achieved an exhibition to study medicine and then surgery at Cambridge University (St John’s College) and Guy’s hospital in London, while making a canoe, developing his own films and playing the violin. At Cambridge he met Elspeth Calder, in the strings section of the Trinity College orchestra; they married in 1960. The couple embarked together on an overseas life dedicated to medicine and surgery in poorer communities.
His first posting – with two small daughters in tow – was to Malaysia, from where we overlanded back in 1970 to the UK in a VW Kombi van, traversing the Grand Trunk Road, Khyber Pass and Silk routes. This was followed by three years in Swaziland (now Eswatini), where Michael was the only surgeon in the country, performing a wide range of operations from large bowel cases, orthopaedics and eye surgery, to repairing cleft palates. He was proud of being – all too rare a profession nowadays – a general surgeon.
Michael then spent three decades in Malawi, initially as one of only two chief surgeons based in Queen Elizabeth hospital in Blantyre, working with the nurses and medical assistants who served the country’s 11 million people. He was also a gifted craftsman, model maker, sculptor, violin maker, jeweller, painter and poet, and created a mother and child installation in the grounds of the hospital. He co-authored books with Elspeth, including The Story of Medicine and Disease in Malawi (1992).
Michael retired from full-time work in 1997 to do voluntary surgery and training in the north of Malawi. He designed and built a beautiful cottage in Nkhata Bay overlooking Lake Malawi from where he would paddle to the hospital to operate on crocodile and hippo bites, on boys who had fallen out of mango trees and to treat severely ill patients with malaria, TB and HIV/Aids. He and Elspeth also drove to the under-resourced district hospitals in northern Malawi, where he performed surgery and trained medical assistants.
They eventually returned to the UK in 2008. For his services to surgery in Malawi, Michael was appointed OBE and received the Malawi Silver Jubilee medal.
My father lived life to the full and with great interest, instilling in others a deep curiosity in the natural world. He is survived by Elspeth, his daughters, Sheenagh and me, two granddaughters and four great-grandchildren.
