Prof. Charles Odamtten Easmon, known among his peers as Dr. Charlie Easmon, was a pioneering Ghanaian surgeon who, according to historical accounts, was the first Ghanaian to qualify as a surgeon specialist.

He was also recorded as the first person in Ghana to perform an open-heart surgery, which was in 1964. 

This feat, among others, marked a turning point in the medical history of Ghana and West Africa. It put Ghana into the limelight of global medicine, well within President Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of the Black man being capable of managing his own affairs in a Ghana that was bubbling with hope as the shining Black star of Africa. 

Life

Prof. Easmon was born on September 22, 1913, at Adawso, a farming community along the Koforidua-Mamfe road in the Akwapim North Municipal Area of the Eastern Region of Ghana.

His father was John Farrel Easmon, a merchant of Creole Sierra Leonean, African-American extraction who settled at Osu, Accra.

His mother, Kate Salome Odamtten, was from a prominent Ga-Dangme family of Osu, Accra, who also had Danish ancestral ties.  

Prof. Easmon was first enrolled at the St. Thomas School at Osu, Accra, in 1918 and then at the Osu Presbyterian Boys’ Boarding School, also known as Osu Salem.

In 1928, after winning a Cadbury scholarship, he attended Achimota College alongside Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president, and Theodore Clerk, who became Ghana’s first architect.

Dr. Easmon earned a British Colonial scholarship to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1935, thus becoming the third person in the Gold Coast after Dr. Oku Ampofo (1933) and Dr. Eustace Akwei (1934) to achieve this feat. Prof. Easmon qualified as a medical doctor MB.CHB in 1940 with an additional diploma in tropical hygiene and medicine (DTM&H) in 1941 from the same university.

He returned to Edinburgh in 1946, where he qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the first Ghanaian to do so. Upon his return to Ghana, he worked at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.

In June 1959, he went to the USA, where he was assigned to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on a five-month fellowship, where he was elected a Fellow of the International College of Surgeons.

In 1960, Prof. Easmon was appointed by President Kwame as Ghana’s first chief medical officer.

He was later reassigned in September 1962 as the first dean of the newly established University of Ghana Medical School and professor of surgery, where he served with distinction. 

Prof. Easmon was the first Ghanaian to be appointed Chief Surgeon of Ghana, the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health, the first president of the Ghana Medical Association, the first dean and first professor of surgery of the University of Ghana Medical School (UGMS), the first Ghanaian to be president of the West African College of Surgeons, the first Ghanaian to be elected a Fellow of the International College of Surgeons, the first chairperson of the Medical and Dental Council, and the first chairman of the Council for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine.  

Mark

Prof. Easmon also designed the logo of the Ghana Medical Association, which is in use to date. He thus left a mark beyond medicine. An award, the Charles Easmon Award, has been dedicated to him and is awarded annually to the best student in surgery at the UGMS.

A ward at the 37 Military Hospital and a building at the University College of Health Sciences have been named after him. Prof. Easmon’s pioneering feats and trail-blazing works in medicine as a whole, medical education, and surgery in particular continue to inspire generations of medical professionals in Ghana and beyond.