Salem F Al-Damluji

Salem F Al-Damluji

Former professor of medicine Baghdad University Medical College, Iraq (b 1924; q Baghdad 1946), died from adenocarcinoma of the lung on 16 September 2001 at St Mary’s Hospital, London.

As a medical student, he won prizes for the most distinguished student in the second, fourth, and sixth years of his training, and he was awarded the King of Iraq and Lord Mayor of Baghdad medals for the first graduate of his year. Following residency in the Royal Teaching Hospital, Baghdad, he was awarded the MD for a thesis on the treatment of heavy metal poisoning with dimercaprol (British antiluecite; BAL). He was then awarded a scholarship, which he used to study internal medicine and respiratory diseases in New York and in Atlanta, Georgia.

Upon his return to Baghdad in 1953, he became actively engaged in teaching medical students and became a leader in respiratory medicine, and an author of many articles and a book on tuberculosis. He was appointed vice chairman of the High National Board on the Control of Tuberculosis in the Ministry of Health, and was elected president of the Executive Committee of the Eastern Mediterranean Region of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases (1972-80). He chaired two regional conferences of that Union, which were held in Baghdad in 1968 and in 1979. He was the founding president of the Iraqi Cardiothoracic Society. His contributions also included topics in internal medicine, particularly studies on patients exposed to methyl mercury poisoning during an outbreak in 1961, and, more extensively, in 1971. He and his colleagues showed by long term follow up that the clinical features were partially reversible in patients who survived the initial, catastrophic effects of poisoning. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine in the University of Baghdad (1971-5). He established, by cooperation with the Royal College of Physicians of London, courses that prepared postgraduate doctors for the MRCP examinations. He was granted the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London, in recognition of his contribution to medical education in his country. He was the overseas adviser for the College in Iraq, and subsequently for the United Arab Emirates, to which he moved in 1980. He was a consultant physician in the Ministry of Health in Abu Dhabi and he represented the United Arab Emirates at the Arab Board for Specialisation in Internal Medicine, of which he was the first chairman (1981-3). He was much liked and respected by his students and colleagues. He was predeceased by his wife, Professor Laman Amin Zaki, and is survived by two sons and a daughter. [Saad Al-Damluji]