A LIFE’S WORK

Alumnus, Fellow and Honorary Fellow of RCSI, Dato’ Dr Godfrey Geh Sim Wah (Medicine, 1965), has had a busy surgical career and co-founded a hospital and a medical college in Malaysia, among many other achievements. At 80 he still practises general, plastic and reconstructive surgery in Penang

In July 1970, Godfrey Geh was made a Fellow of RCSI with wife Mei Ling and his eldest daughter Evelyn and son Vernon, who are now both doctors, in attendance. Dr Geh was conferred by Mr Lannigan, President, RCSI, and Consultant Neurosurgeon. N ineteen-year-old Godfrey Geh arrived in Ireland to study medicine at RCSI in October 1959, in response to a telegram from the College instructing him to “come immediately”. At the time, there were no medical schools in Malaya (now Malaysia).

“I had never set foot outside Malaya before,” he recalls. “It was an adventure. The journey from Penang to Dublin was via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Beirut,

Geneva, Frankfurt and London.”

Term had already begun when Geh arrived in Dublin, but he soon settled in to college life, playing badminton, rowing for the College Eights, serving as president of the Malayan Students Union of Ireland and occasionally skipping afternoon lectures to catch a double bill at the Green Cinema, located a short distance from the

College, where the Fitzwilliam Hotel is now. He lived in

Mrs Kennedy’s boarding house on Grand Canal Street (“near Boland’s – you could smell the bread in the air”), where there was porridge with milk for breakfast every morning. (To this day, he is not able to eat it.) Mei Ling

Loh, whom he knew from Penang, and whom he would later marry, was studying music at UCD and the Royal

Irish Academy on Westland Row. Mei Ling is from a prominent medical family in Penang and her three siblings – Kelvin, Wilfred and Kathleen – all graduated from RCSI.

At RCSI, Dr Moira O’Brien, Dr Sheamus Gallen,

Mr Tom Garry and Professor Brendan Rooney were amongst the lecturers who taught the young Geh. Most of his clinical training was at the Richmond Hospital, and he remembers receiving excellent practical teaching from Mr Harold Browne, Professor Colman Byrnes and Dr Richard Conroy.

“Initially I had thought that I wanted to be a physician,” recalls Geh, “but during the summer of 1964 I went to Baltimore, US to do a three-month Externship in Union Memorial Hospital. There I was attached to Professor John Classen’s Surgical Department. Because they were short of doctors that summer I was doing a job almost equivalent to that of an intern. Professor Classen was very encouraging. He said: ‘Godfrey, you’ve got a good pair of hands, a good brain and good eyesight – come and join us!’

“At that time, even though we had recently gained independence there was no opportunity to train as a surgeon in my own country. So, after sitting the ECMFG in January, getting married to Mei Ling in April and sitting my finals in the summer of 1965 – I remember I was conferred by Mr Terence Millin, who was then President of RCSI, which was a great honour – I returned to Baltimore to take up a rotating internship at Union Memorial. I worked in medicine and the ED, where I saw every type of patient and learned a lot, before joining Classen’s team.”

Geh’s mother was diagnosed with kidney cancer while he was in Baltimore and he made the decision to return to Penang, taking up a position in the Penang General Hospital as the second in command looking after 160 patients.

Godfrey Geh operating with his team at Pantai Hospital Penang in full PPE, April 2020.

Godfrey with a patient from Indonesia and her sister.

“There was my boss, me and four housemen,” Geh remembers. “My boss used to go to the club every day at 4.30pm, leaving me in charge. I had seen a lot in the US, but this was very hands-on.”

Sadly, Geh’s mother died three months after his return and, with a second child on the way, he made the decision not to return to the US but to take up a training job at the University of Malaya Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpur, the country’s first medical school, which had opened in 1965.

In 1969, Geh returned to Ireland for the first time since graduation to sit his Primary Fellowship exams and took up a position at the Meath Hospital as Registrar to Mr Douglas Montgomery, the then President of RCSI. During the course of the following year, he passed his final Fellowship exams and obtained the FRCS (Ire), FRCS (Eng) and FRCS (Edin).

Around this time, Geh made the decision to specialise in plastic surgery. With a glowing reference from Montgomery, he secured a locum position in the Royal East Sussex in Hastings and went on to work at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, Sussex, the mecca of plastic surgery made famous by Sir Archibald McIndoe during World War II.

Geh returned to Malaysia in 1973 and was appointed Lecturer in Surgery at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, and Chief of Plastic Surgery at University of Malaya Medical Centre. At the time, there were only three plastic surgeons in the country, which had a population of 20 million.

At the age of 35, Geh departed Kuala Lumpur for Penang and in 1975, with his father-in-law, an established General Practitioner, founded a Dr Godfrey Geh private hospital, the Loh Guan Lye Specialist Centre in Georgetown. Initially the hospital had just 70 beds, but soon grew to over 300. Geh managed the hospital and practised there for 13 years, before leaving to found another private hospital, Pantai Hospital Penang, in Bayan Baru, another township, where he practises general and plastic surgery to this day. “These days about 60 per cent of my time is taken up with general surgery, and about 40 per cent with plastic and cosmetic surgery. I like the challenge of reconstructions and burns work.” Of Geh and Mei Ling’s four children, three are doctors. Evelyn is a graduate of RCSI who now practises as a GP in Sydney, Vernon is a paediatric ophthalmologist in Southend on Sea, Ashling is a lawyer, and Lynette is a GP in the UK. One of the couple’s six grandsons, now aged 15, hopes to study medicine.

Alongside his surgical career, Geh has been active in medical education. In 1996, with the assistance of Professor Kevin O’Malley and the late Professor David Bouchier-Hayes, Mr Michael Horgan and Professor Alan Johnson, he founded the private Penang Medical College, a joint venture with RCSI and UCD, a legacy that he describes as his “pride and joy”. From UCD there was input from Professors Niall O’Higgins, David Powell and Ron Reagan.

“My idea was that we establish an independent medical school to be run on a ‘reverse-twinning concept’, whereby the first two and a half years (preclinical) would be conducted in Dublin and the following two and a half years (clinical) be carried out in Penang’s public hospitals. The advantages of this programme would be a cost-effective medical education and the acquisition of a medical qualification from two established, well-known and world-recognised medical institutions. Furthermore, returning students would be exposed to our local health care systems and diseases.”

The first intake of 14 students commenced studies in October 1996 in Dublin, returned to Penang in March 1999 and graduated in June 2001. Renamed the RCSI and UCD Malaysia Campus (RUMC), there are now 1,800 graduates.

The bestowing of the Honorary Fellowship of RCSI on Geh in February, is not the first recognition by RCSI of the enormous contribution that he has made to both surgery and medical education during the course of his career. On Charter Day in 1998, Geh was presented with the RCSI Medal, he was made FRCPI in 2006 and his picture has hung in the College’s Corridor of Fame since 2015.

In 1999, Geh was awarded the Penang Datukship (Malaysian Knighthood) in recognition for his role in the improvement of health care services and for furthering medical education in Malaysia.

Today, at the age of 80, he considers himself a fortunate man.

“I have been blessed. I have good health, enough wealth, have enjoyed a successful, satisfying career and am still practising full-time. I have the support of my darling wife and family. I am getting better at work-life balance and try to spend time on the golf course whenever I can. Mei Ling and I, our children and grandchildren, play all over the world – last summer it was Portugal and soon, I hope we will be back in Ireland and hope to play in Dooks, Killarney and Ballybunion.” ^ KATY M CGUINNESS