Professor Abdul Hamid Alabbasi MD FRCPE

Abdul Hamid Alabbasi was born in 1932, the son of a farmer. A highly intelligent child, he gained entrance to the Medical College of Baghdad University, graduating in 1955, and served as a military doctor in the Iraqi Army, including a year’s residence in the Republic teaching hospital. He became interested in cardiology and in 1961 he went to Britain, training in London and Liverpool and passing the Edinburgh MRCP in 1962. He then had a year in Sweden on a fellowship and first encountered the use of medical ultrasound at Lund University, where echocardiography was being pioneered, working alongside Carl Hellmuth Hertz, Professor of Electrical Measurement Technology. He took a particular interest in the then very common rheumatic heart disease and its clinical diagnosis, investigating the value of the newly developed use of cardiac 2D ultrasound.

On return to Baghdad University, he took up the post of lecturer in medicine. While giving one lecture, he met a young medical student, Hatham Alchalabi, and they married in 1965. Thereafter, their careers developed in parallel, hers as a gynaecologist.  The experience gained from his fellowship in University of Lund, enabled him to establish an ultrasound service and a teaching unit in Baghdad, one of very few in the world at the time. 

In 1967/8, Professor Alabbasi worked as research fellow in the Renal Division at Colorado University. He had managed a very large number of patients, especially for renal transplantation, and this experience helped him also to establish, on his return, the first renal unit in Iraq. It was there that he and his colleagues detected one of the world’s largest outbreaks of organic mercurial fungicide poisoning and designed the novel method of treatment using extracorporeal haemodialysis that became a textbook standard. 

Hamid Alabbasi remained in Baghdad as professor of medicine at the University of Baghdad until 1991. He was greatly valued by his colleagues for his commitment to his patients and his teaching of students and young doctors and in 1975 he was elected FRCPE. In 1991 he was invited to take the post of Professor of Medicine at the Jordan University of Science and Technology Faculty of Medicine, where he remained until his retiral and return to Britain with UK nationality in 1994. Even after retiring from academic medicine, he took several NHS consultant physician posts in Britain and worked as an Attending Physician in Maine, USA in the early 2000s. 

It is unnecessary to say more than that times were hard in Iraq over the entirety of Prof Alabbasi’s and his wife’s careers. Because of the dangers from war, they had taken their five school-age children to London when Hatham was awarded a PhD studentship at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School. Both parents were obliged to return but the children remained in London, looked after initially by relatives. All five children were educated there, with three later graduating from Scottish universities. Two followed their parents into medicine, qualifying from the University of Glasgow and becoming a Breast Surgeon and a Psychiatrist. 

Although his reputation rests on the great respect in which he was held by his colleagues and patients as an inspiring physician and teacher of medicine, he was a man of wide interests, ranging from philosophy and quantum physics to cooking, often providing special meals for his family. Hamid remained physically and mentally active in old age, spending time writing, and with his devoted family and his cat. He died after a short acute illness. He is survived by Hatham after 60 years of marriage, his five children and three grandchildren.  

Anthony Seaton 

Balsam Alabbasi 

Zaid Alabbasi