The musical surgeon who sings the Covid blues away
● It was during hard lockdown last year when cardiothoracic surgeon and paediatric oncologist Dr Wilhelm Lichtenberg knew he wanted to speak to the hearts of nurses fighting on the Covid-19 frontline.
Lichtenberg, who is also known as the “Singing Surgeon” on account of his passion for music, which he indulges whenever he has free time, wrote a song called Healthcare Heroes.
“I have huge amount of respect for the nurses,” he said. “They get such a raw deal.”
With funding from Netcare, the video for the song was shot in Cape Town’s City Hospital and has racked up more than 700,000 views on Facebook alone.
When not performing open-heart surgery, Lichtenberg heads to the studio to sing or perhaps for a voice-training session with mezzo-soprano Violina Anguelov.
In 2020 his debut album, Die Tale van die Hart, was nominated for a Sama award in the best classical album category.
“I grew up with music in our home,” he said. “The first time I heard Pavarotti, I wanted to be an opera singer.”
His father, however, convinced him that he could practise medicine and sing in his spare time, “but not the other way around”.
While engrossed in his medical studies, Lichtenberg also played trumpet in a symphony orchestra. “For me, music is relaxation,” he said.
Seeing that the pandemic had also created economic hardship for many people, Lichtenberg — who sings classical crossover music ranging from Schumann to Andrea Bocelli — started making videos to help raise funds for marginalised people.
He is not the only doctor finding an outlet as entertainer.
In Johannesburg, at the beginning of 2020, trauma doctor Suhayl Essa was about to take a break from medicine to do stand-up comedy.
While Essa jokes that he is a doctor “but my Indian parents forced me to become a comedian”, his father was not happy about his son’s plan. “Then Covid hit and my father was, like, ‘You see, I told you so, they don’t need your jokes’.”
Essa has a comedy podcast called “The Daily Dose” that mixes opinion and analysis with humour on everything from Covid-19 testing to life under quarantine. But it had to take a backseat to work when he started working at a public hospital emergency room as the Covid-19 second wave hit.
During the first lockdown, Essa took aim at people complaining about restrictions, such as the Cape Town surfers who protested when the beaches were closed.
“I don’t think they were there for any Fees Must Fall or housing protests but, hey, when you take people’s rights to surf in the ocean away, they then compare it to apartheid. How?”
Essa, who helped evacuate patients during the recent fire at Charlotte Maxeke hospital, said he has no time for misinformation peddled on social media.
“I log in to Twitter every day to discover how many years I wasted at medical school when clearly I could have just read ‘an article’,” he said.
In December, he held a one-man show called Beginning Again which covers his journey from home to medical school to the pandemic. “We do need laughter,” he said. “It’s cathartic and healing.”
Cape Town paediatric haematologist and oncologist professor Marc Hendricks learnt to play music on a second-hand upright piano his mother bought for the family in the 1970s after promising that all her children would learn a musical instrument.
“She absolutely stuck with that commitment,” said Hendricks. The house was full of Motown, jazz and R&B, which influenced his adult contemporary music style.
His first album, Upright Citizen, is a collection of his own songs and he is busy on a second. The track She’s A Girl was the theme song for director Quanita Adams’s film Swirl, which debuted on Showmax and kykNET.
While he is a doctor first and a musician second, Hendricks is grateful for the comfort of music. “I work with kids with cancer,” he said. “It’s very emotional work. To be able to have some way of making sense of the world when it doesn’t always make sense to any of us has been good.”