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On October 17th 1998, at 6 a.m., Hakim Mohammed Said (Hakim Mohammad Saiyd), while walking into his clinic at Arambagh, in Karachi, was assassinated. A tragic fate for a man who was essentially a philanthropist, who never avoided humanitarian duties. A visionary and an idealist, Hakim Mohammed Said had fought, among his other battles, to support yunani (Graeco-Arabic) medicine against all odds.
Hakim Mohammed Said was born in Delhi in 1920, from a family devoted to medicine: his father, Hakim 'Abdul Majid (1883-1922) had started his career by opening a hospital in Delhi (1906) with the purpose of transforming it into the core of yunani renaissance. The name chosen for this project reveals the spirit with which it would operate: Hamdard, i.e., "to share the pain", as if the hakim was telling his patients "your pain is my pain", accordingly to the deep and purest spirit of yunani tradition. The clinic was supported by a dawakhana (pharmacy) that would manufacture relatively inexpensive drugs in the pure yunani tradition. Therefore, very soon Hamdard established itself as the place in which to seek for medical opinion, to be hospitalized and to find medicines.
At Hakim 'Abdul Majid's death (1922) Hamdard was undertaken by the hakim's family, and in 1940 his youngest son, Hakim Mohammed Said, joined the enterprise. However, Hakim Mohammed Said had to remain only for a short while in India, as at the Partition (1947) he decided to move to Pakistan and establish a Hamdard branch over there.
The beginning was very tough: Pakistan was a poor country populated by people with no shelter, and Hakim Mohammed Said himself was without financial means and support. However, he had a great vision, that of building an institution with multiple aims, i.e., that to revitalize yunani medicine and promote it not only amongst the people of Pakistan, but also throughout the world. Naturally he also wanted to treat the sick and the ailing by hospitalizing them in decent clinics, while, simultaneously, he strove in order to promote scientific activities and encouraging knowledge and education.
The clinics had to be financed by the drug laboratories, thus, following the Delhi examples, Hakim Said started the Hamdard Dawakhana (1948), therefore giving new strength to...