Charles Easmon was a medical doctor and academic who became the first Ghanaian to perform the first successful open-heart surgery in Ghana in 1964. Modern scholars credit him as the “Father of Cardiac Surgery in West Africa.
Charles Easmon was elected as the first president of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) in 1958. It was inaugurated by Kwame Nkrumah in Accra.
Professor Charles Easmon, a general surgeon head of the Surgery Department, was the first to perform a closed mitral commissurotomy in the country. This was the first cardiothoracic operation performed in Ghana.
In 1964, he became the first to perform an open-heart procedure in the country using surface cooling to achieve hypothermia.
He used this approach to successfully close an atrial septal defect (ASD) in the first patient.
The same approach was utilized in the second patient in an attempt to close a supposedly similar interatrial communication but the patient did not survive the operation and died shortly in the recovery room; the diagnosis had been wrong.
The resulting criticism after the failed procedure was apparently harsh, being centred on the surgeon’s devotion of scarce resources to the pursuit of open-heart surgery.
Subsequently, the lack of funding and political upheavals in the country virtually brought the open heart program to a standstill.
Source: Mybrytfmonline/Kwabena Nyarko Abronoma
