A Kaleidoscopic Career

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 4

A Kaleidoscopic Career

The Secret of the Knife. By R. Campbell Begg. M.C., M.D., F.R.C.S. Jarrold. 162 pp.

The title and the dustcover alike of this book are misleading—the first suggesting a nice, gory’ thriller, and the second depicting a fierce, fully-armed Arab warrior, behind whom a corpse, head duly covered, is being conveyed on a stretcher. Actually the contents are the concentrated and vividly-interesting memoirs of a New Zealand surgeon, who has packed more adventures info eight decades than could 10 ordinary people in that time. Certainly his surgical knife has been deployed with skill in every imaginable circumstance and has saved numerous lives in dark and outlandish places, but Mr Begg’s reminiscences cover a large number of other fields of experience.

Campbell Begg was reared on his father’s sheep-station in Otago, and was educated at the Otago Boys’ High School, and those impressionable early days gave him a love of wild, unpopulated country which was to be of value to him in the crowded years ahead. Having qualified in London and Edin burgh in his chosen profession Dr. Begg proceeded to see the world, and set off for South Africa where, after practising surgery in the Rand mines he found himself involved in a strike of unparalelled bitterness. This was in 1913, and the following year saw the author dealing with the bloodiest results of the carnage in France. Then he was sent for service to Mesopotamia, a campaign of ups and downs which included the drama of the fall of Kut el Amara. In Mesopotamia Dr. Begg had a vast amount of sickness as well as wounds to keep him perpetually busy. I and himself bad a thousand I narrow escapes from death. This portion of his story is particularly detailed and he relives it for the benefit of thousands of readers who are barely aware of that dramatic, long-drawn-out struggle in the >

Middle East fifty years ago.

Peace-time found the author back in New Zealand, but having some years’ earlier married a New Zealand girl and fathered five children the mundane necessity of earning a comfortable living for all of them became his paramount objective, and he decided to specialise in urology, in which he was ultimately to become one of the most important figures of his profession. He learned to fly and obtained his own pilot’s licence at the age of sixty. It is almost impossible to give even a short summary of the activities of this amazing man. Though he and hi.s fami.y were for many years resident in South Africa, there is no portion of the globe which he has not visited, and in which he has not had unprecedented adventures. from near-shipwrecks to a narrow escape from having had his head added to the fine collection of a Borneo enthusiast in this (perhaps, fortunately) unique practice.

The author was in Austria and Germany at the time of the Nazi rise to power, and in Napier just after the tragic earthquake there. He has seen something of the work of the Firing Doctor Service in Australia; has visited Persia (where he was briefly arrested because suspicious officials were wont to read ' his papers upside down!), as well as Russia, and the New Israel. With the pen of a born reporter Dr. Begg tells innumerable anecdotes of his kaleidoscopic career in gripping and amusing phraseology, and has embellished his book with some excellent photographs. Nearly all medical reminiscences are interesting. but this one transcends most of them for its sheer fascination. “Go abroad and see the world,” is a bit of 'advice often given to people of insular races who are too inclined to think their own island is the hub of the universe. Dr. Begg has taken it with a vengeance! An appreciative foreword to the book has been contributed by* Clifford Morson, 0.8. E.