Hossein Khan Motamed

Hossein Khan Motamed was an Iranian surgeon who lived from 1893 to 1955 and founded Motamed Hospital in Tehran. Born in Tehran on 26 February 1893, he graduated from the Medical School of Tehran in 1915 and completed a residency in Paris. He began as an assistant surgeon at the City Hospital of Tehran, became chief of surgery there and then at Sina Hospital, and from 1922 to 1936 led the surgical section of the Military Pahlavi Hospital with the rank of colonel. His own hospital, opened in 1936, doubled as a teaching school at a time when no other teaching hospital existed in Iran, and its beds included five free ones for the poor. He is described as the first Iranian professor of surgery and the first Iranian to carry out a gastrectomy and a lumbar sympathectomy, and surgeons such as Sadegh Ghazi and Anwar Shakki trained under him. He wrote texts on operative surgery and on hernia, served as personal physician to Reza Shah Pahlavi, and moved to the United States in 1944, where he practised in Garden City, New York and became a citizen in 1954.