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Carmel Lino Cutajar: In at the Deep End: reminiscences of a Maltese surgeon. Allied Publications, 2014. ISBN 978-99909-3-191-4 375pp.
Recent years have seen the publication of an increasing number of memoirs and autobiographies.
The present substantial and heavily-illustrated volume is by a professional whose strong personality, ability and ambition have enabled him to go through a successful career as a surgeon and academic in Malta and overseas.
Writing a sturdy plain prose, the author clearly sees himself as a man who, though often finding himself at ‘the deep end’, has managed with his determination – and often with the support of his wife Irene to whose memory his book is dedicated – to overcome difficulties and carry on successfully.
He has always made good use of networking in his career; his book is of full of names of people in England, Scotland, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, whom he met and kept in contact with long years after their encounter.
Like many another successful man he has had his strokes of luck: his early choice of urology as one of his fields of specialisation (the other being vascular surgery) led to his being appointed to a very well-paid post in Saudi Arabia, where urologists appear to have been scarce in the 1970s.
On his return to Malta he started off at St Luke’s Hospital in a urology specialisation department and an endoscopy unit and applied after a time for the post of director of surgery.
It was another stroke of luck that the selection board was chaired by a distinguished British surgeon with whom Cutajar had research con-nections in a European organisation dealing with cancer research and treatment.
I should add that Cutajar’s research activities and publi-cations came in very useful as the post of director was twinned with that of professor of surgery at our university.
For him, life at home is as important as his public life
Even now, long after his official retirement, he has continued to keep in touch with international medical organisations and has always prided himself on paying out of his own pocket his attendance at the many overseas meetings he goes to.
His seemingly boundless energy is also testified by his activity in non-medical bodies such as the Sovereign Military Order of St John and the Catenians.
His presidency of the Malta Red Cross Society gave him less satisfaction than many other activities, because of the financial problems it was facing and in particular because of the less than satisfactory behaviour of the society’s Gozo section. Under his presidency, however, the society successfully funded and oversaw the rebuilding of a Sri Lankan village that had been completely destroyed by the December 2004 tsunami.
Cutajar devotes a good portion of his book to his years in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi – between 1977 and 1984, which he clearly regards as his heroic years.
He left Malta in 1977 following the acrimonious conflict between Dom Mintoff and the association of medical doctors, which involved the locking out of all the doctors in government employment, forcing surgeons like the author to sometimes to use their own equipment and operate in the few private hospitals or in patients’ homes.
When it became clear that matters would soon get worse, Cutajar, like some of his colleagues, started thinking of seeking work abroad.
When a good offer from an American firm recruiting staff for Saudi Arabia came his way, he readily accepted.
He was fortunate in being sent not to an infernally hot city like Jeddah, but to Khamis Mushayt in a mountainous area with green and picturesque scenery and close enough to the Red Sea to make it possible to motor down to the sea for enjoyable weekends.
As he was the only urologist on the hospital staff it was his job to create an efficient department for the specialisation.
He was kept busy also doing a variety of surgical operations and got interested in types of ailments that were common in that area but unknown in Malta.
A gregarious gentleman
When Irene and their children, Louise and David, joined him, life for him became easier and more enjoyable, though after a time they ended up sending the children to schools in England since the local school, run on American lines, did not suit them.
Cutajar is fond of giving historical or biographical notes for places he was in or significant people he met. Some of them might seem to be unnecessary, but what he writes about the life and culture of Saudi Arabia (and then of Abu Dhabi to which he transferred in 1982) is often lively, since it is based on his own experiences and reflect his reactions to living there.
He clearly got on well with both his international colleagues and with the people he treated or met in the two countries and acquired a good reputation with the authorities there. He got on so well in fact that, when some years later he was on the verge of becoming director of surgery at St Luke’s in Malta, he hesitated whether to apply after receiving a fine offer by phone to go to work as director of surgery in a Jeddah hospital, an offer he finally rejected.
The author returned to Malta in 1984 only when the condition he made of being made head of a new department of urology was accepted.
He was not the sole exiled medical man to return at this time, but the conflict with the medical union still remained unsettled. Things gradually got better since, as Cutajar insists again and again, he has always steered clear of political conflicts.
He writes interestingly of his boyhood and early manhood, dwelling with pleasure on personal and academic successes.
For him, life at home was as important as his public life and this comes out most clearly in the formal way he has celebrated important birthdays and anniversaries of his wedding to his beloved Irene, whose loss a few years ago has clearly hit him hard.
Readers who are not close friends of his might think the has included too many pictures of a closely personal nature which are unlikely to mean much to the general reader, but perhaps it is only typical of this hard-working professional, who is also very gregarious, that he should want to include images of all those people who have meant something to him.