Sami Ibrahim Haddad Papers, 1919, 2021, n.d. | Oberlin College Archives

Haddad, Sami Ibrahim (1890-1957)
Haddad, Ranwa

Sami Ibrahim Haddad was born in Jaffa Palestine on July 3, 1890.  His parents, Ibrahim Haddad and Nazha  Abu Rihan, were from Abey and Hasbaya, Lebanon respectively. Ibrahim was an orphan who found work with the American missionaries in Abey, and later converted from the Greek Catholic faith to the missionaries’ Protestant church. Ibrahim emigrated to Palestine in the latter part of the 19th century, to find work.  He met his wife Nazha whose father had also emigrated from Lebanon to Jaffa for work.  Sami grew up in Jaffa and went to school at the Bishop Gobat school and later the English College, in Jerusalem. The family returned to Abey, Lebanon in the early 1900s and Sami went to the Syrian Protestant College (SPC), where he earned a Medical Doctor (MD) degree in 1913.

Between 1913 and 1919, Sami I. Haddad worked in medicine and public health in various locations in Lebanon and Syria, including Latakiyeh where he met his future wife Lamia Morcos. In 1919, he was asked to run the mental hospital of Asfouriyeh, while its director was on a fund-raising trip for six months. That same year he was also asked to join the King-Crane commission to serve as doctor and translator. In 1920, he was appointed adjunct professor of surgery at the SPC, which would soon be renamed to the American University of Beirut (AUB). He was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship to go to John Hopkins University and Columbia University from 1921 to 1922 where he specialized in surgery and urology. His first son Farid was born in New York during that trip.  One of his mentors in urology was the famous urologist Dr. Hugh Hampton Young.  He became a member of the International Society for Surgery in 1931, and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1934. He was awarded the Lebanese Golden Order of Merit in 1956.

Sami I. Haddad worked at AUB as professor of surgery and urology, chairman of the surgery department, and dean of the medical school. In 1947, he left AUB to found a non-profit hospital called the Orient Hospital where he served as director and chief surgeon, until his death in 1957. With his wife Lamia, they had 6 children: Farid (urologist and surgeon), Fuad (neurosurgeon), Brahim (engineer), Samia (pianist), Labib (mathematician) and Saad (physicist and architect). He bought a house on the same block as the Orient Hospital, in a district of downtown Beirut called Haouz Saatiyeh, where he spent the last ten years of his life.

He traveled extensively, attended many conferences and published widely on medicine and the history of medicine, in Arabic and in English. His publications include The Contributions of the Arabs to the Medical Sciences (1936), which was a topic of great interest to him. He collected a large set of Arabic medical manuscripts, the main core of which has since been acquired by the Wellcome Medical Library.

The fate of Palestine was a source of great sadness for him, especially after his participation in the King-Crane commission whose recommendations were not implemented. His brothers were living in Palestine when it was partitioned in 1948 and war broke out between Arabs and Israelis. They took refuge in Beirut where Sami helped them to resettle, and hired two of them to work at the Orient Hospital. He also ensured that the Orient Hospital offered free services to Palestinian refugees.

Although a Christian at heart, he was tolerant of all other religions, and surrounded himself with friends from all creeds and sects. He was very hard working, had a limitless amount of energy and seldom took any vacations. He was upright and honest with people and in his profession, not always very tactful, but dependable and fair to others; he expected others to be trustworthy and reliable. He was also a shrewd businessman who made very good investments in land, antiques, coins and various other collectables. One of his advisors in his antique collections was Dr. Henri Seyrig, director of the service of antiquities under the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon.

Sami I. Haddad died from heart failure on 5 February 1957, in his house. His students carried his body to the National Evangelical Church for the funeral. He was buried in Beirut’s Protestant cemetery.

Written by Ranwa Haddad (S. I. Haddad’s granddaughter), March 2, 2021

Author: Ranwa Haddad

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