Jack Penn was a South African surgeon and sculptor who worked across both medicine and the visual arts throughout the twentieth century.

Born in Cape Town on 14 August 1909, Penn received his early education at Parktown Boys' High School. The combination of precise technical skill and an eye for form that would mark both of his vocations appears to have taken root during these formative years in South Africa, a country whose civic and cultural life he would remain connected to throughout his career.

Penn pursued surgery as his primary profession, working in a field that demands an exacting command of the human body. Alongside this medical practice, he sustained a parallel commitment to sculpture, a discipline that shares with surgery a deep engagement with physical structure and the material world. That a single individual could maintain serious standing in two such demanding fields distinguishes Penn's career as genuinely unusual. His work as a sculptor placed him among those practitioners who found in art not a retreat from professional life but an extension of the same concentrated attention that surgery required. Penn worked in English and operated within the cultural and institutional frameworks of South Africa.

In recognition of his contributions, Penn received the Member of the Order of the British Empire, an honour that acknowledged the significance of his work within a broader Commonwealth context. He died on 27 November 1996, having lived to the age of eighty-seven.

Throughout his life, Penn moved between the operating theatre and the sculptor's studio, and it is this dual engagement — with the human body as both a site of healing and a subject of artistic attention — that gives his biography its distinctive character. The intersection of surgical practice and sculptural work remained the defining feature of his professional identity.