Professor Mohammad Kar MD

Professor Dr. Mohammad Kar MD
Written by Cambys Kar
Edited by Irene Mead Kar

Professor Dr. Mohammad Kar MD, Founder and first Chancellor of the University of Gondishapur in Ahwaz/Iran.

Dr. Mohammad Kar was born August 8, 1907 in Tabriz/Iran and died January 24, 1994 in Teheran/Iran. He was a French/German educated Iranian pathologist, author, professor at the University of Tehran and in 1955 founder and Chancellor of the modern University of Gondishapur in Ahwaz, Iran and Dean of its medical school.
After his study of medicine at and receiving his doctorate from the University of Teheran the young doctor traveled to Paris/France in 1936, to further his medical education at the University of Paris Medical School (The Sorbonne), where he obtained a second doctorate degree in medicine, specializing in Pathology. There he met and married Tatjana Kowarski, a German born citizen of Lithuanian parents, who was working as a medical technologist at the laboratory of the Paris Zoological Gardens. In 1939 he and his wife traveled back to Iran, to accept a position as professor at the University of Tehran School of Medicine, teaching pathology as well as other related courses, while also practicing medicine at his private office in Tehran.
In the summer of 1953, Dr. Kar took a sabbatical leave and traveled to Germany to update and further his medical experience at the Sanatorium of Gundelsheim, in Southern Germany. While there, he observed that a great number of Iranian patients seeking treatments unavailable in Iran, as well as students in the medical field, were coming to Germany and other European countries to study, due to a lack of sufficient opportunities in their homeland. Both patients and students were suffering from homesickness, loneliness and the challenges inherent in adapting to a foreign land, its language, people and culture, in addition to the heavy financial burden carried by their families back home.
Sensing an urgent need for improvement in the matter, Dr. Kar felt inspired to work toward establishing a medical school in Iran and staffing it with German professors, thus bringing the same high quality educational opportunities, which Iranian students were seeking abroad, to their own country, at a fraction of the cost, while increasing the number of highly trained medical doctors to provide quality care to patients, and eliminating excessive financial and psychological hardships for both students, patients and their families. Such a venture would require only a few foreign professors coming to Iran for limited periods of time, versus thousands of students and patients traveling to Europe and enduring the burdensome struggles mentioned above.
In 1955, Dr. Kar devised a plan and presented it to Professor Ludolph Fisher, Director of the Institute for Tropical Medicine at the University of Tuebingen/Germany, asking for his collaboration in committing the University of Tuebingen to sponsor such a program. Professor Fischer agreed to help arrange a meeting with the Dean of the University and later the Ministry of Education of Baden/Wuertemberg, to support the project. Having succeeded with the German authorities and obtaining an Agreement of Intent, both he and professor Fischer traveled together to Iran, in order to enlist the support of the Iranian Ministry of Education including their financial support for this endeavor.
Having succeeded to arrive at that point, Dr. Kar was in for the fight of his life, due to the corruption of government officials, looking for self-serving opportunities (bribes), which this principled, patriot seeking only to serve his people, was not willing to support. He fought for many months, seemingly unending battles with the Iranian authorities, leading him all the way to the Prime Minister and even His Imperial Majesty Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself, until he finally succeeded in obtaining the go-ahead and a small budget, to start his project. After considering several locations for his medical school, Dr. Kar decided on the city of Ahwaz, capital of Khuzestan province and site of the famous Academy of Gondishapur, the most important medical center of the ancient world in the 6th and 7th centuries.

Following is an account of his ensuing struggles in Dr. Kar’s own words: 

What I would like to mention at the outset, is that no one ever asked me to start this medical school. The idea simply grew out of my genuine love and concern for my countrymen, both students and patients, who at the time had no other choice than to travel to Europe for their more advanced medical needs. Their heavy burdens of time and money spent in the process, persuaded me to bring Europe to them instead.

I rented a small house on a dead end street in Ahwaz and very inconspicuously put up a sign at the front door, which read, Ahwaz School of Medicine. Two of the front rooms served as an office for my general staff, while I lived in the third one for more than two years. I walked all over town fighting to overcome hindrances that obstructed my path day after day. To begin with, my worst challenge was finding a suitable building for my purposes. One day I heard about a large high-class building of about 4,200 square meters that was for sale and priced at 1/6th of its market value. Immediately and with no hesitation I jumped on it. After 14 months of activity and overcoming innumerable obstacles, I purchased the building. Many experts and clever people in the ministry of education declined to support me in that endeavor, thinking that it would be impossible. My sheer willpower, however, drove me to accomplished the impossible. 

Still, this was not the end of it. Five different government offices occupied the building, and I had no legal right to evict them. The main occupant was the governor, a great feudal aristocrat. He was a relative of Queen Soraya as well as of the director of the Savak (the dreaded secret police). In short, a very powerful despot who had no interest in education, culture or the sciences and was interested only in living in carefree luxury. He refused to leave the building. 400 students and 4 German professors had to remain idle, while he was digging in his heels and refusing to cooperate. But I did not stop fighting. When he threatened my life, I decided to buy a weapon, which I carried in my pocket. He tried to humiliate me in front of the people, but I turned his own words against him like a weapon and brought him down from his pedestal, until finally the “Goliath” Djahanshah Khan Samsam Bakhtiar had to capitulate and turn over the building. This fight and its result were well received in town and gave the people some courage and breathing space. 

On November 30, 1957, I took over the building and started to give entrance exams to the student applicants. Then, I called in the professors. We had no equipment yet. The professors could at first merely teach from books. Fortunately, Dr. Petry, the anatomy professor from Marburg, had brought with him two large albums of anatomy slides, which the German foreign ministry had gifted, to the Gondishapur Medical School. 

Something interesting happened though. In view of our situation I had prepared a few basic teaching materials, except for colored chalk, which is indispensable for anatomy classes. When professor Petry asked for it, I sent a dispatch into town to buy some. To my disappointment, there was no colored chalk to be had anywhere. Then I remembered that when I was 6 or 7 years old, I had watched many times how our schoolteacher produced chalk. Therefore, I sent someone to buy a few pounds of gypsum powder and a variety of colored dyes. Then realizing that this was a perfect teaching moment for our students and staff to learn that, contrary to our cultural belief that work is disgraceful, the truth is that work in and of itself, no matter what kind, is in fact, sacred. I rolled up my sleeves and, with my own hands, mixed water and  gypsum powder, divided the mass into different portions, added to them different dyes, spread the portions on a board, cut them into strips and set them out in the sun to dry. Three hours later, we had all the colored chalk we needed. As soon as professor Petry had used some, he remarked: “This is even better than ‘Pelican brand’ chalk” (Pelican being known as Europe’s high end brand in office supplies).

After completing the 4th year of their medical education, Dr. Kar succeed in obtaining a grant from the German government, to send the first 50 students to the University of Tuebingen in Southern Germany, to finish their education by specializing in their chosen fields of medicine. All of them became notable specialist in their own rights. 

In 1961, shortly after this last effort and being both mentally and emotionally exhausted from continuously fighting the relentless interferences of corrupt government officials, Dr. Kar resigned his positions at Gondishapur and retired. It is noteworthy to point out  that visiting faculty members from Tehran University remarked that Gondishapur's high level of education, as well as the quality of their lab equipment and facilities were far superior to that of the University of Tehran Medical School. This too was held against him, since Gondishapur was supposed to be merely a secondary, provincial facility, not to overshadow the prominent University of Tehran.