Sami Ibrahim Haddad

Infobox Writer
name = Sami Ibrahim HADDAD M.D., I.S.S., F.A.C.S., G.M.B.


imagesize = 145px
birthdate = birth date|1890|7|3|mf=y
birthplace = Jaffa, Palestine
deathdate = death date and age|1957|2|5|1890|7|3|mf=y
deathplace = Beirut, Lebanon
occupation = Doctor, Surgeon
nationality = Lebanese

Sami Ibrahim HADDAD, Arabic: سامي ابراهيم حداد (July 3, 1890 – February 5, 1957) was a doctor, surgeon and writer. He was born in Palestine and spent most of his life in Lebanon.

Youth

He achieved preparatory education at the Bishop Gobat School (1901 – 1905) and the English College (1907 – 1909) in Jerusalem. This left an indelible mark on him. His assertiveness, honesty, discipline, and austerity most probably derived from his early Scottish high school teachers in Jerusalem, where he earned the Gibbon Memorial Prize in July 1906. He graduated with M.D. degree from the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in 1913. Founded in 1866 by the American missionaries in Beirut, the SPC was renamed in 1920 as the American University of Beirut. For seven years after graduation (1913 – 1919), He practiced general medicine and public health, and taught the basic medical sciences at SPC. In 1919, he was nominated physician in charge of the Mental Disease Hospital at Asfuriyeh. When the U.S. King-Crane Commission (created by President Woodrow Wilson to poll public opinion in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) arrived in Beirut, he became its physician and interpreter.

Marriage and Family

Before he joined the Department of Surgery of the American University of Beirut as Adjunct Professor of Surgery in 1929, he was granted a Rockefeller fellowship. He married Lamia Morcos (1896 - 1994) who helped him raise six children.

Medical Research

He traveled to the United States to be trained in urology at the Johns Hopkins University under Dr. Hugh Hampton Young. After ten years of industrious preparation and indefatigable study (1913 - 1922), Haddad embarked on the path of teaching and practicing urology and surgery.

He taught medical students, interns, and residents and operated on several patients. In his spare time, he collected Arabic medical manuscripts and wrote about the history of Arabic medicine. He kept abreast of new medical developments through trips abroad to the United States, Austria, Brazil, Australia, Iraq, Qatar, England, France, and Spain. During some trips, he photographed Arabic medical manuscripts and other important documents in the libraries, in Paris, London, and Jerusalem.

He became a member of the International Society for Surgery (1931), a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (1934), a member of the University Council, and in 1941, Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Dean of the Medical School of the AUB. Twice, he was awarded the Lebanese Honorary Golden Order of Merit (1954 and 1956).

He was proficient in Arabic and English and learned French, German and Syriac to facilitate his research in history. He wrote ninety-nine articles on various surgical, urological.Ten of his books were written in English, including Notes on Embryology (unpublished), Essentials of Urinary and Genital Disease (1946), and eight volumes of the Annual Report of the Orient Hospital (AROH) (1948 – 1955). The Contributions of the Arabs to the Medical Sciences (1936) and The Tradition According to Omar (1940) were written in Arabic. Half of his articles were written in English and half in Arabic. His articles on urology dealt with cystoscopy, pyolography, hematuria, genitourinary tuberculosis, renal and ureteral lithiasis, hemangioma of the bladder, calculi, prostatic enlargement, and prostatic cancer.

He also published articles on various forms of cancers, and the art of surgery. His research on the history of medicine resulted in articles on Arab hospitals, Ibn Nafiys (Ibn alNafyis, the nineteenth-century discoverer of the pulmonary circulation), Hippocrates, Galen, Arab dentistry, cesarean section, medical ethics, medical biographies, and a catalogue of the Arabic medical manuscripts he had collected. He also wrote the history of Arabic script, the medical problems of the Arab countries, and the Mameluke documents concerning the church of the Nativity in Jerusalem.

Orient Hospital of Beirut

In 1947, he founded the Orient Hospital, a fifty-four bed non-profit institution, and shouldered the responsibility of its varied and intricate administration.

Death

Sick with heart disease the last five years of his life, he died on February 5, 1957, in Beirut. At the funeral, his students carried his coffin to the [http://www.nechurchbeirut.org/index1.htm National Evangelical Church] .

External links

* [http://samihaddad.info Sami Ibrahim HADDAD Official Website]
* [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/islamic_medical/islamic_15.html Sami Ibrahim HADDAD: History of Arab Medicine]
* [http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/Current%20Newsletter-list6.htm The Sami Ibrahim HADDAD Memorial Library]
* [http://www.bookcost.com/author/sami-i-haddad/ Complete works: Dr. Sami. I. Haddad : history of Arab medicine]
* [http://www.nechurchbeirut.org/index1.htm National Evangelical Church]