Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici - contenuto non piu disponibile

o October 17th 1998, at 6 a.m., Hakim mohammed Said (Ḥakīm moḥammad Saīyd), 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 yūnānī (Graeco-Arabic) medicine against all odds. Hakim mohammed Said was born in Delhi in 1920, from a family devoted to medicine: his father, Ḥakīm ʾAbdūl majīd (1883–1922) had started his career by opening a hospital in Delhi (1906) with the purpose of transforming it into the core of yūnānī 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 ḥakīm was telling his patients “your pain is my pain”, accordingly to the deep and purest spirit of yūnānī tradition. The clinic was supported by a dawākhāna (pharmacy) that would manufacture relatively inexpensive drugs in the pure yūnānī 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 Ḥakīm ʾAbdūl majīd’s death (1922) Hamdard was undertaken by the ḥakīm’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 yūnānī 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