Arise Sir Cecil

by DR GARREY MICHAEL DENNIE

IN MAY 1970 a Vincentian woman barely 23 years old found herself in excruciating pain. Radiating from her stomach, over several hours the pain got worse. In search of medical relief she took herself to a private medical clinic. Relief, however, would not be found there. Instead, the doctor advised her that she needed emergency medical treatment which could only be performed at the Colonial Hospital.

Heeding the advice of the private doctor, she rushed herself to the hospital. As the pain tore through her body, the attending emergency medical staff in what was then known as The Casualty made a crucial decision: they issued a call to Dr Cecil Cyrus, the Surgeon on call. By 5 pm that evening Patient X was moved to the surgical theatre and during the next eight hours, Dr Cyrus would perform life- saving surgery on this young lady which almost 50 years later, she recalls to this very day.

Patient X was, in fact, suffering from an ectopic pregnancy, a condition where the fertilized egg lodges itself outside of the uterine chamber. In this particular instance, the fertilized egg had embedded itself within her fallopian tubes which offer no room for the growth of a fetus. Left unattended, the fetus would burst the fallopian tube leading to internal bleeding, destroyed fallopian tubes, and even death.

Patient X also recalls that her medical misfortunes extended beyond the ectopic pregnancy. She recounts that in attending to her ectopic pregnancy, Dr. Cyrus also discovered that she was also suffering from appendicitis. The human appendix is essentially useless. However, if it inflames and bursts in a patient, it can also lead to death. So in Patient X telling of her medical story, Dr Cyrus had performed not one, but two lifesaving operations on her as she lay on his operating table. Hence, to this day when the subject of Dr Cyrus is brought to her attention, she says, “After God, is Dr Cyrus.”

The precise details of Patient X’s memories are of course subject to correction. And Dr Cyrus’ own notes of this surgery would provide invaluable information on this particular case that came before him. But the essence of Patient X’s story is unimpeachable: in a moment when she was at extraordinary risk, Dr Cyrus saved her life. And she is neither the first nor the last patient who would genuflect to the extraordinary surgical expertise and medical compassion Dr Cyrus brought to his work as a Vincentian doctor. Her story, however, provides an entry point for the fundamental argument this article offers: Dr Cyrus revolutionized Vincentian medical culture.

Notwithstanding Patient X’s great misfortune by being hit with the double whammy of an ectopic pregnancy and an inflamed appendix, she was certainly lucky in one single respect: Dr. Cyrus was the surgeon on call. For by 1970, Dr Cyrus was in his sixth year working at the Colonial Hospital. He had returned to St Vincent in January 1964 to offer his medical skills to Vincentians. By then he had spent more than a decade abroad in the world’s most acclaimed medical schools acquiring the expertise and authority borne out of the undisputed medical successes that modern medicine had achieved as the bringer of healing to the afflicted through its reliance on the most rigorous set of intellectual and scientific practices. Patient X, and all Vincentians, were now the beneficiaries of the services a world class surgeon working in the medical backwaters of the colonial Caribbean.

Understanding Dr Cyrus’ place in Vincentian medical history therefore necessitates clarity on the state of St Vincent’s medical universe before 1964. Broadly speaking, this was little changed since the days of slavery where the medical personnel and services available were simply insufficient to meet the needs of the population. Disease and death stalked the land. And nowhere else was the colonial disregard for Vincentian lives made more manifest than in the Colonial Hospital itself. For in this place of last resort against medical calamities, St Vincent lacked the single most potent weapon that could tip the balance in the struggle between life and death: a trained surgeon.

Dr Cecil Cyrus is the first trained surgeon in the history of St Vincent and the Grenadines. And undoubtedly, some of the untrained surgeons would have had some medical successes. But that very lack of expertise also meant that many Vincentians also died preventable deaths either on the operating table or from post-surgical complications. Indeed, Patient X recalled that her own surgery had complications which demanded Dr Cyrus’ considerable expertise to prevent a catastrophic outcome.

In fact, Dr Cyrus’ status as the first trained surgeon in St Vincent had a far broader impact than Dr Cyrus himself might have imagined. For in colonial St Vincent, Dr. Cyrus was not simply the first trained surgeon – he was also a native born Black Vincentian surgeon. His presence therefore unsettled the older racist idea that Black people lacked the intellectual capacity to master modern science. And in a colony where the political and medical hierarchies were white, the colonial hierarchies resisted conferring to Dr Cyrus the power and status that befitted a surgeon of his expertise, and which they would reflexively have accorded to his white or English colleagues. Rather, in 1964, they chose to create a new bureaucratic regime where our only trained surgeon was in fact subordinate to those without his training or expertise.

An article of this brevity cannot do justice to the towering career of Dr Cyrus. But when you multiply the story of Patient X thousands of times, his impact on Vincentian medicine is immeasurable. Dr Cyrus, and Vincentians can indeed be proud that his knighthood offers official recognition to this great Vincentian servant. But Patient X now 71, and who would go on to have two more children after the surgery, already knew that he was her knight in shining armour.