Reginald A. Carpenter, BA, MB, BChir, MRCS, LRCP, MA, FRCS, FRCS(Ed), is a Jamaican born some 76 years ago in Kingston. He received his high school education at Jamaica College, his undergraduate education at Cambridge University, and later attended the London Hospital Medical School and graduated in 1954.

He returned to Jamaica in 1961 as a Senior Registrar in Surgery at the UHWI. Four years later he was appointed Lecturer in Surgery at the UWI and Consultant Paediatric Surgeon at the UHWI. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1970 and assumed the Chair in the department of Surgery in Mona in 1980.

Professor Carpenter’s contribution to Paediatric Surgery and to medical education has been outstanding. He was responsible for the establishment of a high quality Paediatric Surgical Service at the UHWI and at the Bustamante Hospital for Children and during these years was seen as the resource for treating difficult cases not only from within Jamaica but the wider Caribbean. In this regard he would also inspire a number of young doctors to become paediatric surgeons and some of them are in this audience tonight. In 1974 he became Coordinator of the then fledgling Postgraduate Surgical Programme and in 1975 was appointed the first Director of the Postgraduate Medical Education Unit in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Mona.

He has been invited as external examiner to the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and to the University Kebangsaan in Malaysia. He has also been examiner in both parts of the Fellowship examination of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

Consultancies have taken him to Grenada and Grand Cayman, and he has been an advisor on surgical practices to the World Health Organisation. He has been a Visiting Professor to the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and to the University of Bristol.