Dr. Kamil Nasr was eight years old in 1948 when his parents fled their home in Haifa for Egypt, where his mother had relatives. But his native Palestine never left his heart. Nor did Egypt, where he would stay 10 years, or Lebanon, where he would become a physician.ĚýĚýÂ
“I want to support the next generation of ophthalmologists in the regions where I lived and grew up,” explains the doctor, who was a Â鶹AV lecturer for 35 years while practising ophthalmic surgery at the Montreal General Hospital, now part of the Â鶹AV Health Centre, as well as at the former Reddy Memorial Hospital.ĚýĚýÂ
That’s why in 2021 he pledged to create a master’s scholarship in his name at the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Â鶹AV. The Dr. Kamil Nasr Scholarship will be awarded to master’s students based on merit, with a preference for students coming from the same conflict-ridden part of the world as he did.ĚýĚý
“We’re hoping to be able to award the first scholarship of $10,000 this fall.”ĚýĚý
An eye on medicineÂ
Nasr says he arrived at Â鶹AV in 1967 somewhat by chance after studying medicine at UniversitĂ© Saint-Joseph in Beirut, which was affiliated with UniversitĂ© de Lyon. He had applied to Â鶹AV and UniversitĂ© de MontrĂ©al for his ophthalmology specialty, but it was Â鶹AV that accepted his application. “In Palestine, my father had been a judge in the English court, so we had a British passport. Yet my English wasn’t very good.”ĚýĚý
There were several reasons he chose eye medicine as his specialty. “As a child, I used to repair watches, and I was attracted to tiny things that require meticulousness. I also imagined it as an elegant specialty, with very little blood and few emergencies.”ĚýĚýÂ
Eye surgery is undoubtedly one of the fields of surgery that has evolved the most, he explains. “In 1967 we were in the Stone Age. To do cataract surgery, we had to cut the eye open and remove the entire lens, then suture it with thread. Patients were immobilized for a week with their head stabilized between two sandbags. There were lots of complications and the patient, who no longer had a lens, had to wear Coke-bottle glasses for the rest of their life. Today we insert an implant, and the patient often doesn’t need glasses at all after the surgery. We are also seeing enormous progress in the treatment of other eye diseases, such as macular degeneration, which is fantastic.”ĚýĚýÂ
“I came to Montreal at a wonderful time, the year of Expo 67, and I adapted very well to life in Quebec. I’d go so far as to say that I emancipated myself from Middle Eastern cultural conventions, particularly when it came to manners and the tendency to stick within your family.” In 1973, he returned to Beirut to open his own practice, but the project was to be short-lived. In 1975, the first phase of the war in Lebanon, known as the “Troubles,” began. “There were blockades everywhere and fires. The conditions for running a practice were becoming difficult.”ĚýĚýÂ
Nasr returned to Canada that year, passed the exam to obtain his licence to practise and started working at Â鶹AV and other Montreal hospitals. He would remain at Â鶹AV for decades, until stepping down in 2010. “I wanted to make room for a fantastic young candidate, a glaucoma specialist, who needed a position, and I was no longer operating.”ĚýĚý
He retired for good in 2014, and for the past 10 years has been learning Italian, as well as embracing a life of travel.Â
His condo on Nuns’ Island, in the Montreal borough of Verdun, is filled with works of art. It also has photos and paintings of his parents and sister, whom he brought to Canada and who have since passed away, and his maternal uncle, Maximos V Hakim, Patriarch of Antioch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church from 1967 to 2000.ĚýĚý
“He was quite a character,” recalls Nasr, himself a Greek Catholic (Melchite). He accompanied his uncle on each of his trips to Canada. “They were state visits. He was received by the Prime Minister and the Governor General.”ĚýĚý
Kamil Nasr makes no secret of the fact that his family’s flight from Palestine to Egypt left deep scars. “It was meant to be a temporary exile but after a year, my parents put me in the care of Jesuits in Cairo. My father, who was 48 at the time, found work as a legal adviser to the British embassy in Cairo but his career as a judge was over.”ĚýĚý
In 2021, the university approached Nasr to request a donation, and told him about a program, the Martlet Research Trust, in which the university would double the amount of his donation up to a maximum of $125,000.ĚýĚýÂ
Nasr jumped on the opportunity. “At this stage of my life, it’s very important for me to contribute to the advancement of eye care,” he says. In so doing, he joins a small but growing group of donors, graduates and former faculty members who provide financial support to the Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences. “What makes me the happiest,” he says, “is that this grant, which bears my name, will be given in perpetuity.”ĚýĚý
This article was first published in French:Â Un don pour la vision