Carl August Richard Schulenburg was born in Ventersdorp, Transvaal, South Africa, on 2 February 1915, the son of August Carl Schulenburg, a general practitioner, and Susanna Maria Madgalena née Lemmer, a farmer's daughter. Two of his brothers became GPs, and one sister a midwife. From Ventersdorp Primary and High School, he went to the University of Cape Town, where he won the gold medal in anatomy, and won scholarships in his second and third years. He was house surgeon and house physician at the New Somerset Hospital, Cape Town, before going to England to work in the Guy's sector of the Emergency Medical Service from 1939 to 1941. He then returned to South Africa, as a Major in the South African Medical Corps. After the war, he was appointed senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Pretoria Medical School, later becoming the senior surgeon of the H F Verwooerd Hospital, Pretoria. He was an Hunterian Professor in 1951. He wrote extensively on operative cholangiography and other topics, winning the Hamilton Maynard memorial medal from the *South African Medical Journal* for the best paper published in 1961. He married a Miss Croft in 1939, and had one son and three daughters. He died on 1 November 1997.