The Health Care Revival in Iraq

Cardiologist Mahmud Thamer, MD, returned to Iraq last year for the first time in almost 25 years. The country's once-prestigious medical system was in chaos, with doctors and nurses working for no pay, facilities in disrepair, medicines in scant supply, and recent looting and burning. Many of the physicians with whom he had worked during the 1960s had survived the regime, he discovered, but the long-term pressures from living in a dictatorship and being isolated from the rest of the world had taken their toll. Since the Ba'athist coup of 1968, free speech had become impossible, imprisonment and murder had become everyday threats, and corruption had spread deep into the medical system.

“It was a bittersweet return—lots of bitter and lots of sweet,” said Thamer, who had last lived in Iraq in 1969. That year he left a teaching faculty position with Baghdad Medical School to move to the United States, where he had earlier graduated from Harvard Medical School and trained at Johns Hopkins University. “If I had stayed in Iraq, I would have to be quiet and do what I was told to do by the members of the Ba'ath party. That was against my principles and temperament, but neither could I resign and stay in Iraq because it was illegal. To resign, I'd be imprisoned and have my license taken away,” he said.

He visited his homeland sporadically during the 1970s to give lectures and teach at the medical school, but he did not return after 1979, the year that Saddam Hussein assumed the presidency. “Under now president Saddam, there was even more intrusion into who you talked to and what you said. While visiting, you had to make statements in front of television and radio answering questions about what you thought of Iraq and Saddam. If …