The Barbershop Quartet: A Surgical Saga

A life story in neurosurgery, in the operating theatre, and in the law courts. Giant leaps forward in medecine are contrasted with life and death stories of the humour, personal triumphs and tragedies of daily life in the wards and consulting rooms and the law courts.

Colin Froman was born in 1935 in Witbank, a coal mining town east of Johannesburg. He was educated at King Edward VII School and the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he graduated as a medical doctor in 1958.

He spent time in Medical, Surgical and Obstetrical Units in Johannesburg and Capetown. He worked in London in 1961-2 where he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and Edinburgh.

He joined the Department of Neurosurgery, at the Baragwanath (Chris Hani Memorial) Hospital, Soweto.

He spent 40 years in the practice of Neurosurgery, from 1962 to 2002, in Johannesburg and its environs, with an interlude of three years from 1965 to 1967 when he was Nuffield Fellow in Oxord where he completed a D.Phil. degree in Respiratory Physiology.

He has taught, traveled and written widely in the field of Neurosurgery.

He married Penny Jammy in 1963, and they have three married children and they dote on their eight grandchildren.

He spends his retirement living in Israel, where he writes, reads, swims, surfs the Internet, plays bad golf and bridge and travels to see the grandchildren.