Emmanuel Latunde Odeku
Profession: Neurosurgeon and Poet (Africa's first Professor
of Neurosurgery)
Book: Twilight, Out of the Night, an anthology of poetry.
Origin: Awe, Oyo State
-On the 29th of June 1927, in the Adubieye Compound of a tiny settlement known as Awe, Afijio Local Government in the then Oyo Province of Western Nigeria, the cries of a chubby baby boy resonated through the thatched roofs of time-tested huts, bouncing against the soft palm fronds. A star was born. From a hamlet in Yorubaland of West Africa, he would go on to become the first professor of neurosurgery in Nigeria, the world's most populous black nation. He was named EMMANUEL OLATUNDE OLANREWAJU ALABA the son of ODEKU.
-His father was a deacon in the Baptist church and he would later attend the St. John's School in Aroloya, Lagos State for his primary education in 1932. A bundle of intellectual gifts, he then proceeded to the Methodist Boys' High School (MBHS) in 1945 after which he left for America as a beneficiary of the New York Phelps-Stokes Fund Scholarship for Medical Education. He had also passed the London Matriculation Examination in the same year leading the whole set in English, Geography, History, Chemistry and Biology. It was in MBHS that he shortened his name to Latunde (toosh things ba? LOL!)
JOURNEY TO THE MEDICAL WORLD
-In April 1950, he came first in his undergraduate class at the College of Liberal Arts in Howard University, Washington D.C, United States graduating summa cum laude (with the highest honour). The $8,000 scholarship that he had won saw him through the medical school from 1950 to 1954 when he received his MD. In his senior year in the Howard Medical School, he worked as an intern at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor (1954-55). As an intern, he drank from Professor Edgar A. Kahn's gourd of knowledge. By the end of the year, he had so much impressed his superiors that he was offered a residency position. And till 1960, he would remain a dutiful and intelligent student of Dr. Kahn who was the chief of neurosurgery (why am I remembering Dr. House all of a sudden?).
-According to Professor Kahn, Odeku was the very best of all the residents that he trained and he even co-authored a textbook of neurosurgery with him, Correlative Neurosurgery. Odeku also majored in neuropathology under the legendary late Professor Carl Vernon Weller, MD for his postgraduate internship. (Weller's son, Thomas Huckle Weller of Harvard University would later win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1954 as an American virologist for showing how to cultivate the polio virus in a test-tube using tissues from monkeys).
-In 1961, after he finished his training under Dr. Kahn, he returned to Howard University and became a member of the faculty of neurosurgery and a lecturer in neuroanatomy and later, consultant neurosurgeon at the Freedmen's Hospital of the same school from 1961-1962 under a special programme organized by the United States Public Health Service. At that time, he was the 2nd black to be certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the first US-trained black neurosurgeon.
-He would later go to the University of Western Ontario, Canada where he bagged the Licentiate of the Medical Council of Canada (LMCC) in 1955. One major reason why he went to Canada was to have a better understanding of the problems facing medical practice in tropical regions since he would later work in the tropics of Africa. He later became an authority in tropical neurology.
-Fresh from training with a brain spewing off terabytes of vast medical knowledge, he got multiple job offers to work in the United States of America. But then something very radical happened.
(Please copy link below for his autobiography)
http://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/2008/Omobowale08.pdf
http://www.nairaland.com/1184263/latunde-odeku-nigerias-first-neurosurgeon
#nationalweekofremembrancefordepartedwriters Book: Twilight, Out of the Night, an anthology of poetry.
Origin: Awe, Oyo State
-On the 29th of June 1927, in the Adubieye Compound of a tiny settlement known as Awe, Afijio Local Government in the then Oyo Province of Western Nigeria, the cries of a chubby baby boy resonated through the thatched roofs of time-tested huts, bouncing against the soft palm fronds. A star was born. From a hamlet in Yorubaland of West Africa, he would go on to become the first professor of neurosurgery in Nigeria, the world's most populous black nation. He was named EMMANUEL OLATUNDE OLANREWAJU ALABA the son of ODEKU.
-His father was a deacon in the Baptist church and he would later attend the St. John's School in Aroloya, Lagos State for his primary education in 1932. A bundle of intellectual gifts, he then proceeded to the Methodist Boys' High School (MBHS) in 1945 after which he left for America as a beneficiary of the New York Phelps-Stokes Fund Scholarship for Medical Education. He had also passed the London Matriculation Examination in the same year leading the whole set in English, Geography, History, Chemistry and Biology. It was in MBHS that he shortened his name to Latunde (toosh things ba? LOL!)
JOURNEY TO THE MEDICAL WORLD
-In April 1950, he came first in his undergraduate class at the College of Liberal Arts in Howard University, Washington D.C, United States graduating summa cum laude (with the highest honour). The $8,000 scholarship that he had won saw him through the medical school from 1950 to 1954 when he received his MD. In his senior year in the Howard Medical School, he worked as an intern at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor (1954-55). As an intern, he drank from Professor Edgar A. Kahn's gourd of knowledge. By the end of the year, he had so much impressed his superiors that he was offered a residency position. And till 1960, he would remain a dutiful and intelligent student of Dr. Kahn who was the chief of neurosurgery (why am I remembering Dr. House all of a sudden?).
-According to Professor Kahn, Odeku was the very best of all the residents that he trained and he even co-authored a textbook of neurosurgery with him, Correlative Neurosurgery. Odeku also majored in neuropathology under the legendary late Professor Carl Vernon Weller, MD for his postgraduate internship. (Weller's son, Thomas Huckle Weller of Harvard University would later win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1954 as an American virologist for showing how to cultivate the polio virus in a test-tube using tissues from monkeys).
-In 1961, after he finished his training under Dr. Kahn, he returned to Howard University and became a member of the faculty of neurosurgery and a lecturer in neuroanatomy and later, consultant neurosurgeon at the Freedmen's Hospital of the same school from 1961-1962 under a special programme organized by the United States Public Health Service. At that time, he was the 2nd black to be certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery and the first US-trained black neurosurgeon.
-He would later go to the University of Western Ontario, Canada where he bagged the Licentiate of the Medical Council of Canada (LMCC) in 1955. One major reason why he went to Canada was to have a better understanding of the problems facing medical practice in tropical regions since he would later work in the tropics of Africa. He later became an authority in tropical neurology.
-Fresh from training with a brain spewing off terabytes of vast medical knowledge, he got multiple job offers to work in the United States of America. But then something very radical happened.
(Please copy link below for his autobiography)
http://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/2008/Omobowale08.pdf
http://www.nairaland.com/1184263/latunde-odeku-nigerias-first-neurosurgeon
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