Saib Shawkat

Saib Shawkat was an Iraqi surgeon, anatomy teacher and Arab nationalist politician, who lived from 1898 to 13 February 1984. Born into a Baghdad family of Georgian origin, he studied medicine in Istanbul from 1913 to 1918 and completed postgraduate work in general surgery in Germany. He was the first Iraqi doctor to teach anatomy at the Iraqi Royal College of Medicine, later became its dean, and was among the pioneers of general surgery in Iraq, directing Baghdad Hospital in the 1930s. In 1932 he sat on the founding committee of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, and he attended King Ghazi after the fatal car accident. A published account of the 1941 Farhud describes him operating on and protecting the mostly Jewish patients of the Baghdad hospital, even though his political leadership of an Arab nationalist club is separately attributed to him.