Adelola Adeloye: quintessential neurological surgeon, neurologist, distinguished academic, medical historian, and biographer

Abstract

Adelola Adeloye (formerly Rufus Bandele Adelola Adeloye) is the second Nigerian doctor to qualify as a Neurological surgeon in 1967, having trained in Nigeria, United Kingdom and the United States of America. He worked with the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan and the University College Hospital, Ibadan as an academic Neurosurgeon and honorary Consultant Neurosurgeon, respectively from 1968 to 1995. He subsequently took up appointments in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Malawi where he served in various capacities. He garnered panoply of academic and professional qualifications in the course of his career, matched by an equally prolific array of scholarly publications on diverse subjects. The high points of his career would include the landmark description of the Adeloye-Odeku disease in 1971, helping to institutionalise local Neurosurgical training in Nigeria, helping to set up a Surgery department in the then fledgling Medical School in Malawi, his election as an honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and honorary President of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, as well as his appointment as an Emeritus Professor of Neurosurgery by the University of Ibadan. An altruistic and far-sighted man, he ensured that the first Nigerian Neurosurgeon who died prematurely and other Nigerian/African pioneers of Medicine/ Neurosurgery are properly immortalised by a painstaking and selfless documentation of their lives and contributions. Biographies of Prof E. Latunde Odeku (Nigeria’s first Neurosurgeon and the first Black Neurosurgeon trained on US soil), Dr James Africanus Beale Horton, and other such writings are testament to this.

Keywords: Adelola Adeloye; Neurosurgery; Nigeria; Adeloye-Odeku disease; Congenital dermoid cyst of the anterior fontanelle