Obituary:Dr Zoheir Khayat

In Greek legend Sisyphus was condemned forever to push a great rock up a hill. Each time he reached the top it fell back again to the bottom. This was the story of Dr Zoheir Khayat. Three times he built up a splendid medical practice; each time it was overcome by revolution.

He was an extraordinary doctor who, from the mid-1950s, was driven from one Middle Eastern country to another, and ended up ministering to the sick in Beirut throughout the civil war at the cost of all his possessions and great personal danger.

His father had left Aleppo in Syria in 1897 in search of adventure and trade, taking the well-known silk route down to the Red Sea. He found a great deal of both in the Sudan. There he survived persecution by the Muslim leader, the Mahdi, but succeeded in becoming his advisor, briefly settling there long enough to meet Zoheir's mother Nozha, a woman of Turkish and Assyrian descent whom he married in 1909.

Zoheir, who was one of seven sons, was born in Omdurman in 1911. The family moved up to Cairo, where Zoheir was educated as a Roman Catholic. In 1931, accompanied by his twin brother, Sabry, Zoheir left Cairo for France to read Medicine. The completion of his degree and thesis kept him busy in Paris and Montpelier until 1938, when he returned to Egypt to settle with his family and begin building up a private practice. In 1948, following a chance encounter, he met Claire Cassab, and they married shortly afterwards, a day after his birthday, on 1 August 1948.

By the age of 45, in Cairo, Zoheir Khayat had a happy family and an enviable first-class practice among the elite of the old Establishment and the Court itself. The advent of Nasser in the early 1950s put an end to all his ambitions. He faced threats to his property, his religion and his liberty. Nasser's new regime hit the Christian and Jewish communities hard. Khayat's position as physician to King Farouk and the Jewish community made him particularly vulnerable.

In September 1961, fearing for his family's safety and his children's future, he drove them across the Western Desert and over the Libyan border. There he once again established himself as a leader of his profession, as physician to King Idris and his family.

After five years he felt again the rumblings of revolution. Following several humiliating experiences in the hands of the increasingly influential revolutionary factions of the army, he decided to abandon his career in Libya. His two sons, Georges and Antoine, were already at school in Switzerland, and he and Claire followed them there. But he needed a Swiss Diploma of Medicine to be allowed to practice.

As a result of a family friendship with the British Ambassador in Benghazi, the boys moved to a new school in England, Ratcliffe College in Leicester. Then, thanks to a chance encounter at his sons' school, Khayat was persuaded by a fellow parent on the Board of the Save the Children Fund to go to Algeria and head a medical mission to care for some 30,000 tuberculosis victims, east of Laghouat, some 450km south of Algiers. After 18 months he badly damaged his back moving equipment and was no longer able to carry on.

He and his wife decided to go to Beirut, at that stage the most civilised, the most prosperous and by far the most pleasant city in the Levant. There for the next 10 years Khayat once again created a successful practice. But underneath the prosperity of Beirut, the conflict between different races, different cultures and different religions was gradually increasing. In 1975 it exploded into open and violent civil war.

Khayat felt it was his duty to remain in Beirut where the need for him was greatest. Each year he and his wife would travel to England for a brief holiday. Each year against all persuasion from their friends they would return to his patients, to their shattered flat, the shellfire and the bloody fighting in the streets. They faced this life of sacrifice in the belief that their friends, neighbours and patients needed his skills as a physician to surmount the trials and atrocities of such a brutal and cruel civil war.

Finally, some 10 years ago, when Khayat had reached the age of 77, they came back to London. Separation from their two sons had in no way weakened but rather strengthened family ties, while adding to par-ental pride was the sons' success - Georges as a doctor, and Antoine in banking and finance.

Ivor J. Crosthwaite

Zoheir Georges Khayat, physician: born Omdurman, Sudan 31 July 1911; married 1948 Claire Cassab (two sons); died Ipswich, Suffolk 22 July 1996.