Thomas Rees, Plastic Surgeon Who Treated Africa

Thomas Rees, Plastic Surgeon Who Treated Africa, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: November 22, 2013

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Dr. Thomas D. Rees, an innovative New York plastic surgeon who helped found the Flying Doctors Service of East Africa, a charity that employs a fleet of small planes to provide medical care and save lives deep in the African bush, died on Nov. 14 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 86.

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Dr. Thomas D. Rees, a New York plastic surgeon, on an outreach mission with his neediest patients, in Africa in an undated photo.

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Dr. Rees in an undated photo.

His daughter, S. Elizabeth Rees, said the cause was liver cancer.

New York magazine once referred to Dr. Rees as “one of the fathers of aesthetic surgery in New York,” and he is credited with helping to elevatecosmetic surgery from something one did not really discuss to almost a status symbol. “Teenagers were given a ‘Rees nose’ for Christmas,” he wrote in 1993.

But it was in Africa that he found his neediest patients, an endeavor inspired by a trip he took there in 1956 while on a fellowship in London. A colleague with a farm in Tanzania had invited him down for the warm sun and the chance to see African wildlife.

But while there, as he related in a memoir, he found himself treating a warrior holding his intestines in place with an old blanket after being gored by a charging rhino. Dr. Rees had few instruments with him and no general anesthetic, no antibiotics and no blood plasma. He also had no choice but to operate on the man immediately; there was to be no plane service for a medical evacuation until the next day. The man survived.

“I wasn’t sure why, but I knew my life’s direction had been permanently altered” by the experience, Dr. Rees wrote in the memoir, “Daktari: A Surgeon’s Adventures With the Flying Doctors of East Africa,” published in 2002.

He went on to join Dr. Michael Wood and Dr. Archibald McIndoe in 1957 to found the Flying Doctors. It now operates in 11 countries, offering, among other services, emergency care, vaccinations, surgery to repair congenital deformities and airlift evacuations of critically ill patients.

The Flying Doctors’ founders also set up an umbrella organization called the African Medical and Research Foundation, which has become one of Africa’s largest public health initiatives. In 2005, it was awarded the Gates Award for Global Health.

Dr. Rees wrote 140 medical articles and six medical texts, including “Aesthetic Plastic Surgery,” a two-volume standard. In an interview on Tuesday, Dr. Sherrell Aston, the chairman of the plastic surgery department of Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, called Dr. Rees “one of the true giants in the specialty.”

Dr. Aston said that Dr. Rees, himself a former chairman of the hospital’s plastic surgery department, was one of the first to “openly teach plastic surgery to other plastic surgeons” in the late 1960s and ’70s. To polish his profession’s image, he also seized opportunities to speak to the news media, an activity more conservative physicians disdained.

“There was a time when cosmetic surgery was looked at as being rather frivolous,” Dr. Aston said.

Thomas Dee Rees was born in Nephi, Utah, on Feb. 3, 1927. His father, Don, was head of the biology and zoology departments at the University of Utah, which Thomas entered at 16. He graduated in an accelerated course when he was 19 and earned his medical degree two years later. He served two stints as a Navy officer, one in 1945 and the other in 1957-58.

Dr. Rees trained in general and plastic surgery at the Genesee Hospital in Rochester and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. He was then chosen for a prestigious fellowship in London with Dr. McIndoe, who had advanced plastic surgery with ingenious treatments for injured British airmen during World War II. Dr. McIndoe worked with his cousin Dr. Harold Gillies, considered the father of plastic surgery.

It was during Dr. Rees’s fellowship in 1956 that Dr. McIndoe said he was planning his annual visit to Africa, where he had a farm near Mount Kilimanjaro. He asked Dr. Rees to come along, and maybe see some animals.

“Archie said it was time to escape the beastly English winter and feel the warmth of the African sun,” Dr. Rees wrote.

There, they met up with Dr. Wood, a colleague from London, who was just starting a plastic surgery practice covering a huge section of East Africa by air. Within five years, the organization they founded had drawn support from Albert Schweitzer, the Aga Khan, Edward R. Murrow and Arthur Godfrey, the radio and television personality, who donated its first plane.

For many years, Dr. Rees spent a month in Africa every year, his daughter said.

Dr. Rees was a professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a former president of the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. He organized an annual symposium that attracts more than 1,000 plastic surgeons from around the world. This year’s event is scheduled for the first week of December.

Dr. Rees’s wife of 63 years, the former Natalie Bowes, an early fashion model with the Ford agency known as Nan Rees, died last year. His son David died in 1990. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son Thomas Jr. and his brother, J. Richard.

Dr. Rees retired to Santa Fe in the mid-1980s because of osteoarthritis. He became a sculptor, finding inspiration in African people and animals.

Ibrahim Abatcha, Chadian Politician

Ibrahim Abatcha (1938 – February 11, 1968) was a Muslim Chadian politician reputed of Marxist leanings and associations. His political activity started during the decolonization process of Chad from France, but after the country's independence he was forced to go into exile due to the increasing authoritarinism of the country's first President Francois Tombalbaye. To overthrow Tombalbaye he founded in Sudan in 1966 the FROLINAT, of which he was the first leader and field commander. Two years later he was killed in a clash with the Chadian Army.

Originally from Borno (a province of the British colony of Nigeria), Abatcha was born into a family with a Muslim background in the French colony of Chad at Fort-Lamy (today N'Djamena) in 1938, and learned to speak French, English and Chadian Arabic, but not to write Classical Arabic, as he did not study in a Qur'anic school. He found work as a clerk in the colonial administration and became a militant trade unionist.

Abatcha entered politics in 1958, becoming a prominent figure in the new radical Chadian National Union (UNT), mainly a split from the African Socialist Movement (MSA) by promoters of the No-vote in the referendum on Chad's entry into the French Community. The party's followers were all Muslims, and advocated Pan-Africanism and socialism. Towards the end of the colonial rule, Abatcha was jailed for a year either for his political activities or for mismanagement in the performance of his duties.

After independence in 1960, Abatcha and his party staunchly opposed the rule of President Francois Tombalbaye, and the UNT was banned with all other opposition parties on January 19, 1962. After that Abatcha was briefly imprisoned by the new Chadian government.

After his release, the UNT cadres decided that if the political situation in Chad became too unbearable to allow the party to survive, it would be wise to send out of the country some party members so that the organization would in any case maintain its existence. Thus Abatcha, who held the position of second adjutant secretary-general of the UNT, was sent in 1963 to Accra, Ghana, where he was later joined by UNT members Aboubakar Djalabo and Mahamat Ali Taher. By going into exile, the UNT members meant also to ensure their personal safety and organize abroad an armed revolt in Chad. As part of the means to preserve the unity of the movement, Abatcha wrote for the UNT a policy statement; this draft was to be the core of the official program of the FROLINAT.

Abatcha led the typical life of the Third World dissident in search of support in foreign capitals, first residing in Accra, Ghana, where he received his first military training and made friends among members of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon that had found asylum there. The Cameroonians helped him attend conferences organized by international Communist groups.

After leaving Accra in 1965, Abatcha started traveling to other African capitals always seeking support for his project of beginning an insurgency against Tombalbaye. The first capital he reached in 1965 was Algiers, where the UNT had already a representative, probably Djalabo. His attempts were unsuccessful, as were those made from there to persuade the Chadian students in France to join him in his fight. From Algiers, he traveled to Cairo, where a small secret committee of anti-government Chadian students of the Al-Azhar University had formed. The students in Cairo had developed a strong political sensitivity because they had come to resent that the degrees obtained by them in Arab countries were of no use in Chad, as French was the only official language. Among these students, Abatcha recruited his first supporters, and with the help of the UPC Cameroonian exiles contacted the North Korean embassy in Egypt, which offered him a military stage. Seven Cairo students volunteered, leaving Egypt in June 1965 and returning in October; these were to be with Abatcha the first military cadres of the rebels. Abatcha with his "Koreans" went then to Sudan in October 1965.

Once in Sudan, Abatcha found fertile ground for further recruitment, as many Chadian refugees lived there. Abatcha was also able to enroll in his movement former Sudanese soldiers, including a few officers, of whom the most distinguished was to become Hadjaro Senoussi. He also contacted Mohamed Baghlani, who was in communication with the first Chadian insurgents already active in Chad, and with the insurgent group Liberation Front of Chad (FLT).

A merger was negotiated during the congress at Nyala between June 19 and June 22, 1966 in which the UNT and another rebel force, the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT) combined, giving birth to the FROLINAT, whose first secretary-general was agreed to be Abatcha. The two groups were ideologically ill-fitted, as they combined the radicalism of the UNT and the Muslim beliefs of the FLT. FLT's president, Ahmed Hassan Musa, missed the conference because he was imprisoned in Khartoum; Musa suspected with some reason that Abatcha had deliberately chosen the moment of his incarceration to organize the conference due to his fear of FLT's numerical superiority over the UNT. As a result, once freed Musa broke with the FROLINAT, the first of many splits that were to plague the history of the organization. Thus Abatcha had to face from the beginning a level of considerable internal strife, with the opposition guided by the anti-communist Mohamed Baghlani.

The unity was stronger on the field, with Abatcha and his so-called Koreans passing to Eastern Chad in mid-1966 to fight the government, and El Hadj Issaka assuming the role of his chief-of-staff. While his maquis were badly trained and equipped, they were able to commit some hit-and-run attacks against the Chadian army, mainly in Ouaddai, but also in Guera and Salamat. The rebels also toured the villages, indoctrinating the people on the future revolution and exhorting youths to join the FROLINAT forces.

The following year Abatcha expanded his range and number of operations, officially claiming in his dispatches 32 actions, involving prefectures previously untouched by the rebellion, that is Moyen-Chari and Kanem. Mainly due to Abatcha's qualities as both secretary-general and field-commander, what had started in 1965 as a peasant uprising was becoming a revolutionary movement.

On January 20, 1968 Abatcha's men killed on the Goz Beida-Abéché road a Spanish veterinarian and a French doctor, while they took hostage a French nurse. Abatcha disavowed this action and ordered his men to free the nurse. However, due to these actions, on February 11, Abatcha was tracked down by the Chadian army and killed in a clash.

Abatcha's death was the end of an important phase in the history of the FROLINAT and more generally of the rebellion. Abatcha had been the one generally acceptable leader of the insurrection. After him, the FROLINAT was more and more divided by inner rivalries, making it more difficult to provide the insurgents with a coherent organization.