Javad Heyat

Javad Heyat (1925 to 2014) was an Iranian surgeon and writer, born in Tabriz into an aristocratic Iranian Azerbaijani family; his father Ali Heyat was Chief Justice under the Pahlavi dynasty. He studied medicine in Tehran and then in Istanbul and Paris in order to specialize in cardiology, and at Hedayat hospital in Tehran he performed the first open heart surgery in Iran. He wrote over eighty articles in Persian and twenty in English and French for medical journals, and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 became professor of surgery at Islamic Azad University in Tehran, where he published three surgery manuals. He served as the personal physician of Ayatollah Khamenei while Khamenei was President of Iran. Outside medicine he founded and edited the journal Varliq in Tehran in 1979 and wrote on the history and language of Azerbaijan; his pan-Turkist writings, including a claim that the poet Nizami Ganjavi was Turkish, have drawn criticism.