Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

British War Medal 1914-20 (Dr. Naguib Bey Mahfouz.) minor edge bruise, very fine £180-£220

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, Medals from an Africa Collection.

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Naguib Mafouz MB, BCh, MCh, FRCP, Hon. FRCOG, Hon. FRCS was born in Mansoura, Egypt in January 1882. He founded the first department of obstetrics and gynaecology in Egypt at the Kasr el Aini Hospital in 1904, and served as obstetrician and gynaecologist to the Egyptian Royal Family. He served during the Great War with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s Medical Service, as a doctor at the Kasr el Aini Hospital, Cairo (MIC confirms that this is his full entitlement; he did not qualify for a Victory Medal). His autobiography, The Life of an Egyptian Doctor, gives the following:

‘When war broke out, most of the British professors at the Medical School volunteered for service with the army. When the military hospitals could not accommodate the wounded the Kasr El Aini Hospital was taken over by the army. The hospital was soon filled with the sick and wounded who were looked after by the Egyptian staff. For instance, although a gynaecologist and obstetrician and not a general surgeon, I was put in charge of a section of forty beds and performed all the necessary surgical operations on Australian and British soldiers, while I also looked after Turkish prisoners of war in their special ward.

In May 1919 I contracted Typhus fever which I caught from a patient through not having noticed a scratch on one of my fingers when I operated without gloves, which we were short of during the war. Thirteen days after performing the operation symptoms of typhus appeared. The attack was exceptionally severe and I was looked after by my two friends Dr Sami Sabongi and Dr Iskander Girgawi.’

Professor Naguib Mafouz was awarded the Order of the Nile in 1919, and later the First Class Order of Merit and the State Prize of Distinction for Science in 1960. In time he had many private patients including the families of senior government ministers, diplomats, King Farouk and President Gamal Abdul Nasser. Whilst attempting to come to the aid of one of his patients, he had further brush with death:

‘In 1919 I had agreed to attend the confinement of the wife of the American First Secretary who was also Charge d’Affaires and who had employed for the occasion a nurse by the name of Mrs Lendrum. Labour came on suddenly and I was called at once. This happened to be the first day of the 1919 Egyptian Revolution and demonstrators had tried to get into the British Embassy and destroy it. Instructions went to the British Army to impose a curfew, of which I was completely unaware, on the whole district of Garden City. I drove my car, a De Dion Bouton Torpedo, to the Embassy’s official house in Garden City and as I drove came under fire from the British soldiers. Two bullets went through the windscreen of my car and whistled past my ear, one of them almost hitting me. Had it not been for Mrs Lendrum, who was that moment standing at the window and screaming at the top of her voice for the soldiers to stop firing, I would undoubtedly have been unable to write these lines.’ (Ibid)

Professor Naguib Mafouz died aged 92 in July 1974.

Sold with a copy of The Life of an Egyptian Doctor by recipient, published in 1966, and copied research, including photographic images of the recipient with King Farouk and President Abdel Gamal Nasser.