John Golding is one of the few in my select pantheon of heroes. It is not because he is reputed to be a great orthopaedic surgeon, as I am not competent to make that assessment, but because in my view he was plainly and simply an outstanding and upstanding physician.

I came to Mona as a medical student in 1951, and having passed my first and second medical examinations had entered clinical training in 1954. I recall Golding, then a senior lecturer in orthopaedic surgery, explaining to us that orthopaedics derived from the two Greek words meaning “straight boy” and the essence of the specialty was to straighten the broken body, and I think that was part of the creed by which he lived.

A polio epidemic struck Jamaica in 1954 and had left many broken bodies to be straightened. It was in a morning lecture on orthopaedics in 1955 that Golding asked our class for help. The epidemic was overwhelming the health system and he had established a rehabilitation centre in the Mona Valley, but there was a shortage of physiotherapists to treat the recovering polio patients. Some of us volunteered and after a crash course in basic physiotherapy we went to give passive exercises to the patients under Golding’s guidance.

It was through his efforts and his persistent and persuasive ways of raising money for a good cause that the centre expanded to deal with a range of physical disabilities, and disabled people, not only from Jamaica but from the rest of the Caribbean, regained functional mobility because of the ingenuity and dedication of Golding and the band of volunteers and professionals he gathered around him.

He did not confine his expertise to Mona. He travelled all over Jamaica, encouraging surgical colleagues in the peripheral hospitals and made an iron rule at the University Hospital of the West Indies that no orthopaedic referral from a rural hospital was ever to be turned away.

I recall, vividly, driving with him to Spanish Town (he drove furiously) to work with the resident surgeon and Chief Medical Officer Leo Freeman, operating on patients being anaesthetized by a nurse anesthetist with a mask and open ether. But, in spite of his furious driving, he was deeply concerned about road safety and the relevant Jamaica legislation owes much to his persistent advocacy.

On these trips with him he did not only discuss medicine but also the ethics of the profession about which he was passionate. He would speak of the responsibility of the privileged, among whom he counted many medical professionals, to those who are less fortunate. On more than one occasion he would speak to me of people being injured in accidents and not having legal representation and, therefore, not being compensated. And I know that later in life he was partly responsible for addressing this social deficiency.

But one of the highlights of my interaction with him as a student was accompanying him to the site of the Kendall train crash in 1957. He describes the scene vividly in his book Ascent to Mona. I will never forget his empathy for the survivors and the manner in which he and Dr Vincent Rob, the surgeon at Spaldings hospital, set about the multiple surgeries that had to be performed to straighten broken bodies.

I eventually became professor of medicine, got to know Golding as a professional colleague and would marvel at his seemingly boundless energy dedicated to helping in numerous laudable social causes. He would never tire of speaking of the needs of the physically challenged and history recalls the heroic efforts made to institute games for the paraplegics.

He was absolutely convinced that it was society’s responsibility to provide the physically challenged with the technologies and resources to enable them to be optimally productive. I would hear about his many contributions to this ideal and I know it took shape in the Hope Valley Experimental School which, at its inception, was the only school in the Caribbean to have physically challenged and able children taught together.

Our medical class thought so highly of Golding that at our first reunion he was the professor invited to be our guest speaker. I also recall his superb treatment of my wife for a supposedly intractable problem. When Golding died in 1996 and I read the record of the many ways in which he impacted positively on Jamaican and Caribbean health, I was sad because he had been taken when I know that he would have felt there was so much more to be done. But I also felt proud that I knew, was taught and mentored by this remarkable Jamaican patriot.

Sir George Alleyne was chancellor of The University of West Indies from 2003 to 2010 and then 2010 to 2017. He also served as the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean from 2003 to 2010.