From surgery to storytelling: The remarkable journey of Prof Berend Mets

It’s not every day you meet someone who is not only engaging but can hold his own on a wide range of topics with ease… and is remarkably accomplished, too.

Prof Berend Mets is one of those people. Author, celebrated academic and health care professional, his company is as stimulating as his list of achievements is extraordinary.

Mets said his first love is medicine, his second is his wife, Ulane, and his third is anaesthesia.

A career carved from medicine

He completed a masters of fine arts in creative writing at Carlow University in Pittsburgh simply because, he said: “If I was going to write books, I wanted to do it properly.”

This was while working as professor and chair of anaesthesiology and perioperative medicine at Pennsylvania State University.

When Mets was not writing, teaching or in the operating theatre, he swam, cycled and ran. A life lived to the full.

His academic career spawned his authorship. “As an academic you have to write,” he said. “If you do not publish, you perish.”

Writing research papers taught him clarity and structure, it also showed him that storytelling had a place, even in science.

“You need a hook. You need to tell a story even in technical writing.”

He published two nonfiction books, Waking Up Safer? An Anesthesiologist’s Record was published in 2018 and two years later he penned Leadership in Anaesthesia: Five Pioneers of the Deadly Quest for Surgical Insensibility.

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Writing with purpose

He was then drawn to writing fiction. “I wanted to tell bigger stories,” he said.

His first novel, Immorality Act, explored a forbidden love story during apartheid. His recent second novel, Truth and Conciliation, looks at the human complexities around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“Historical fiction is a better way to teach history,” he said. “People connect more when they experience history through characters.”

Personal history also played a part in the stories he chose to tell. Mets’ father, an allied volunteer soldier during World War II, was imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp.

“He never spoke about it much, but it made me wonder how people can justify dehumanising others and believe they are doing the right thing,” he said. Medicine and writing, for him, are closely linked.

“As anaesthetists, we are there at birth, death, sickness and recovery,” he said. “It gives you a direct view into the full arc of human life.”

A life shaped by travel, history and humanity

Born in Indonesia to Dutch parents, he was on his first plane at six weeks old. His father worked for an oil company as an attending health care professional and was deployed around the world.

His upbringing included living in England, Holland, the West Indies and, later, South Africa, where his folks settled.

Mets studied medicine at Stellenbosch University and specialised in anaesthesia at the University of Cape Town.

While studying he met Ulane, who became his life partner. When they both completed their studies, they backpacked around the world before settling down to careers and family.

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Rooted in South Africa, inspired by the world

But, Mets wanted to test his mettle and moved to the US to join Columbia University’s anaesthetics faculty in New York.

“I wanted to test myself internationally,” he said. “I needed to see how I measured up.”

Mets has lived and worked on four continents and travelled to more than 80 countries, published more than 85 peer reviewed articles and led international anaesthesia training programmes.

“There was a time when I had three jobs,” he said. “Running a department, doing international work and academic writing.”

These days he divides his time between the US, the Dutch Caribbean and SA.

“I never stopped feeling South African,” he said. “My heart stayed here.”

He returns to Cape Town every year and still keeps a flat in Table View.

Mets is the kind of person you want to chat to for hours. Not just for his great company, but for what you will learn.

“It is about being curious,” he said. “Medicine, research, writing. They are all ways of trying to understand the human experience.”

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