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SCMP Reporter

Professor Ong Guan Bee

Surgical pioneer and teacher

Born:  September 20, 1921, Kuching, Sarawak

Died: January 10, 2004

When Professor Ong Guan Bee  was due to perform one of his trademark pioneering operations at Queen Mary Hospital, leading surgeons from around the world often sat quietly in the theatre to watch the master at work. The regular presence of some of the top medical professionals  was a mark of the huge respect and enormous stature of the man who inspired generations of Hong Kong surgeons.

And when Professor Ong was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in 1999, the redoubtable doctor sat before distinguished surgeons and discussed his condition. In the course of his brilliant tenure as head of the University Surgical Unit at Queen Mary Hospital, he had trained most of the doctors in the room. Calmly, he talked about his illness and the operation that was necessary to save his life. The surgeons who performed the procedure carried out his instructions.

The operation on Professor Ong was, like most of the tens of thousands of operations he had carried out himself, a success. He lived for another four years. Professor Ong, doyen of surgeons not only in Hong Kong but most of Asia, died on January 10, 2004. It was the departure of a man who had, in the course of a remarkable medical career,  extended the lives of thousands suffering from what in earlier times would have been fatal diseases.

Former colleagues of Professor Ong speak of him with awe and respect, bordering on love.  Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the diminutive figure of Professor  Ong would sweep through wards at Queen Mary Hospital. 'It was like Napoleon leading the Grande Armee,'  recalled one patient who recovered from a serious cancer after Professor Ong operated on him.

He was a radical, far-sighted medical practitioner who thought outside accepted boundaries. One breakthrough entailed using part of a victim's stomach to build a new bladder - a major advance in bladder cancer treatment. He was recognised  as one of the world's top pioneers of delicate head, nasal and throat operations.

Professor Htut Saing,  who worked closely with Professor Ong for 34 years, said many surgical procedures which were now world standard practices had been devised by Professor Ong during his long years of service with the University of Hong Kong surgical unit,  at Queen Mary Hospital.

'He was incredibly innovative and opened new horizons,' said Professor Saing, who is now retired but remains an honorary professor with the surgical unit. Like other surgeons, Professor Saing watched in awe as Professor Ong carried out complex operations. 'He was wonderful in surgery,' Professor Saing said. 'It was beautiful to watch his hands at work. Young surgeons learned so much from him. He was a marvellous teacher.'

Transplants were one area in which Professor Ong helped elevate medical practice in Hong Kong, starting with the first kidney swaps  in the 1960s. Although he was physically small,  colleagues invariably  described him as 'a giant of a man'.   When age forced him to retire from the university  in 1982, aged 61, one newspaper described him as 'a prince of his profession' and another as 'the superstar of medicine'.

As a boy growing up in  under- developed Sarawak, he never wanted to be a doctor. But his father, a wealthy merchant in the British possession in Borneo, was determined his son would study medicine. Aged 16, he applied to the university of Singapore but was rejected because that year's intake of students had been filled by applicants from Malaya. So he applied to Hong Kong and was accepted.

During his second year of studies, the Japanese invasion closed the university. What followed was an incredible saga largely overlooked by historians.

Led by Professor Gordon King, dean of the medical faculty, the young medical students trekked into China and eventually enrolled at the Shanghai college of medicine, which was operating in the wartime capital of Chongqing.  Eventually finishing his medical studies in Hong Kong in 1947, Professor Ong  went on to study at the Royal Colleges of Surgeons in both London and Edinburgh. Returning to Hong Kong in 1953, he joined the government medical services and was sent to  Kwong Wah Hospital as a consultant. 'It was hell,' he was to say in later years. 'Two patients to a bed, fish bones and cigarette stubs on the filthy floor.' Doctors didn't make regular inspections; they were too busy caring for private, fee-paying patients. There were only a few forceps in the  theatre. The young Dr Ong exploded. He ripped out the filthy sheets and furniture, ordered new instruments, and had the wards  scrubbed.

The uproar gained the attention of  the authorities,  and he was asked to take over emergency surgery at Kowloon Hospital. He worked in wards and operating theatres 18 hours a day.   After six years of  relentless pressure, he was appointed Professor of Surgery at  the University of Hong Kong.

From 1964 until his retirement in 1982, Professor Ong presided over the vast responsibility of 800 beds in four hospitals. He operated, he taught, he wrote. Late at night in his office he composed more than 200 surgical papers, 20 of them on the subject of throat cancer.  When he left government service, he estimated that he had performed 36,000 operations.

When Professor Ong retired in 1982 (to be replaced by Professor John Wong who still fills the position today) he went into private practice.  He was honoured by his peers, but even such a close friend as Dr Lam Sin-fook, also a medical professor before he became deputy director of the Medical and Health Department in the 1980s, said in a speech that Dr Ong 'explodes at slow minds and slow hands'. 'He belongs to the bees, the butterflies and the wasps of academic life,' Dr Lam once said.  'He works, he sparkles, he stings.'

Professor Ong is survived by his wife, Paula, and his two children, Lisa and Michael, both doctors.



Superstar of medicine inspired generations of surgeons