The Kingsmen
Kenneth John Graham
Ken Graham, a prominent heart surgeon, was pivotal in advancing heart surgery in New Zealand.
Ken attended King’s High School from 1950 to 1955. While at King’s, Ken was a Cornetist in the school’s brass band each year. In 1954 he won the cup for the Best Sergeant in the school’s A Company Cadet Corps and in 1955 was appointed Head Prefect and RSM (Regimental Sergeant-Major) of the school’s cadet corps.
Ken moved on to the University of Otago, where he studied for his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, graduating in 1962. From then until 1967 he served as a Registrar in both Nelson and Dunedin, before heading north to become a Cardio-Thoracic Registrar at Green Lane Hospital in Auckland, where being left-handed in surgeries designed to cater for the great majority of right-handed surgeons, caused him a few difficulties.
In 1970 Ken was awarded an American Public Health Fellowship and he and his young family moved to Portland, Oregon for Ken to work under the well-known surgeon Albert Starr for 18 months.
He returned to Green Lane in 1972 as a Consultant Cardiac Surgeon. Ken rose steadily in responsibility through the years. He was part of the team that established the country’s first heart transplant unit at Green Lane Hospital. In 1988, in collaboration with cardiologists Trevor Agnew and Arthur Coverdale, they performed the first heart transplant in New Zealand. This achievement marked a significant milestone in New Zealand’s medical history.
Additionally, Dr Graham contributed to the evolution of emergency treatment for heart attacks. Understanding the importance of timely intervention, he worked on improving techniques such as Angioplasty to prevent damage to heart muscle during Myocardial Infarctions.
Typically modest in his achievements, he admitted privately that technically replacing an unhealthy heart with a healthy transplant was no bigger deal than replacing a car engine; it was surgery with an unhealthy heart that was much more problematic.
Ken retired as a heart surgeon in 2005 and he returned to his family’s farming roots when he and his wife Patricia purchased a one-hundred-acre property on the Bombay hills on which to run cattle and some sheep. On about five acres of sun facing slopes they planted grapes of Italian varieties and they marketed the wine under the Hitchen Road label.
Ken also resumed his cycling and after the pruning of their boutique vineyard had been completed and arrangements made to feed cattle, they headed to Europe where they toured extensively by cycling, notably an epic ride from London to Rome. They also cycled in the UK, France, and the Iberian Peninsula. The relentless spread of Auckland into rural areas has meant they sold their property to a developer and retired to a rural area above Pokeno, although they still own a small property some 15km distant on which they run cattle.
PHOTO CAPTION
The photo was first published in The Fiji Times, in 1992, showing Ken performing a unique surgery at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Fiji, on a patient from Nasinu, outside Suva, who suffered from Mitral Stenosis, a narrowing of the heart valve caused by Rheumatic Fever. The procedure Ken carried out was called a Mitral Valvotomy.
He was there with a Kiwi medical team performing free heart operations.
The article said "the team...Anaesthetist, Dr Donald Stenhouse, Operating Theatre Nurse, Sister Jean Chalton and Intensive Care Ward Nurse, Sister Helen Richardson...had already performed seven operations on [the] Monday and Tuesday and will complete 15 more...."