Jack Penn

Jack Penn (14 August 1909 – 27 November 1996), M.B., Ch.B., F.R.C.S.(E.)., Mil. Dec. M.B.E., S.M., was a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, sculptor and author, who was also for a time a member of the President's Council in South Africa. 2Early years Penn was born in Cape Town in 1909, the youngest of 7 children. After World War I, the family moved to Johannesburg, where he was educated at Parktown Boys' High School and the University of the Witwatersrand. 2Training Married in 1934 Diana Malkin, Penn and his wife went to the United Kingdom, where he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1935. He worked successively at the Orthopaedic Centre in Liverpool, at the then new British Postgraduate School in London, as acting Senior Surgeon at a County Council hospital in London, and as Resident Surgical Officer at the Royal Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury. He also spent part of 1937 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, in the United States of America, then returning, with a short spell in London, to Johannesburg, where he was offered a part-time appointment as lecturer in Clinical Anatomy by Prof. Raymond Dart at the University of the Witwatersrand. 2The military context: plastic and reconstructive surgery Penn enlisted as a part-time officer with the rank of major in the Union Defence Force (predecessor of the South African Defence Force), being called up in 1939 as a major attached to the 7th Field Ambulanc