DR DESMOND MAURICE VINCENT REA: 1925 – 2023

When my father-in-law met our baby daughter, his first comment was “She has a nicely sculpted philtrum.” This was indeed a compliment, if delivered rather clinically, from a man whose long career was keenly focused on anatomy and the appearance of the human body.

Desmond Rea was a well-respected plastic surgeon; he was part of the first generation of highly skilled doctors to be recognised as a separate specialty trade, in 1956, by the Royal Australian College of Surgeons. His career was of note for its variety – he worked in the fields of hand surgery and peripheral nerve injuries, burns, amputations and limb trauma, and the more aesthetic procedures for the face, breasts and nose.

He also had a long career, aided by a law degree he completed in his 50s. He was still assessing medico-legal cases into his 80s after he’d stopped operating. Desmond was one of five expert witnesses in a case a few years ago against the Murrumbidgee Local Health District which resulted in a significant payout of more than $1 million to a woman who suffered complications after hernia surgery.

Desmond was born in a private hospital in Wellington, New Zealand, and altogether felt he had a fortunate childhood, despite the effects of the Depression. There were six children sharing two bedrooms, and their father was frequently away selling insurance. Desmond described his mother as “lovely but undomesticated”; she raised them on eggs, fish and chips. He recalled people wearing clothes made from sugar sacks, and frequent peddlers at the front door, offering knife sharpening or odd jobs to make ends meet, and men being sent to relief camps from where they worked on the roads or other government projects.

He came from Irish stock and had a Catholic schooling, and like many of his young mates worked at a variety of places, helping out at the hardware shop, sorting mail at the post office or selling cigarettes and sweets at the theatre, in his brass-buttoned blazer and pillbox hat. He remembered that “from the age of five I would hop on a tram and go into Courtenay Place”, a bustling part of Wellington, where he would sell the Saturday evening paper (which, he complained later, was full of sport and no real news).

After struggling during his first year at university, Desmond was thrilled to be accepted into medical school at New Zealand’s oldest University, Otago, in Dunedin. In his year there were around 100 male and 25 female students. He supported himself with a government bursary, worked at the wool stores or meat works during his vacations, and skipped lunch most days. He initially boarded with a widow who provided his meals and did his washing. Later he lived closer to the campus and somehow inveigled himself into life at the Anglican Selwyn College, dining at the long tables, playing rugby, dressing as a Roman legion for the capping processions, and attending the various university balls in his dinner suit, and parties where they would sing around a piano.

Around the time that Desmond graduated from medical school, World War II was coming to an end. The horrific wounds that soldiers suffered during the two world wars resulted in significant advances in reconstructive and aesthetic surgery and led to the specialised discipline field of plastics.