Keyvan Moghissi obituary | Medicine

I first met Keyvan Moghissi, who died aged 98, in 1980, when I shared an apartment with his son, Alexander, a close friend of mine. Keyvan was a prominent cardiothoracic surgeon; what he really loved was healing people. His kindness, care, and empathy toward his patients were renowned and shine through in his memoirs, Off My Chest: Tales of a Cardiothoracic Surgeon (2018), From My Heart (2024), and In My Memory (2025).

Born in Tehran in what was, he liked to recall, still known as Persia, Keyvan was the second of six children of Monireh Rouhani, a teacher, and Ahmad Moghissi-Chirazi, a civil servant; the family were members of the progressive, peaceful and often persecuted Bahá’í Faith.

A bright and curious boy, Keyvan went to Dar ul-Funun High School and followed his older brother to medical school in Tehran; in 1947, he enrolled at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where he graduated as a surgeon. Initially committed to an academic career, after visiting Britain in 1954 to study cardiothoracic surgery, he became a practitioner.

He moved to Britain after meeting Elsie (née Alexander), an eye nurse from Moorfields, Geneva. They married in the mid-1950s. Keyvan worked in various hospitals, including Edgware, Nottingham and Southampton, and completed rotations in cardiothoracic surgery in Hammersmith, Harefields, Middlesex and Great Ormond Street; in 1970 he was appointed consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Castle Hill Hospital, Hull. There, far from the fountains and pomegranates of Persia, he undertook to create a major European center for cardiac surgery and an analytical research center.

In 1979, he organized the European Club of Thoracic Surgery, the forerunner of the European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery, of which he was president in the 1980s. Keyvan was a pioneer of various surgical developments, such as heart bypass surgery, laser surgery and photodynamic therapy. His honors are too numerous to list, and while he was pleased with them, he took great pride in his accomplishments as a improver and sometimes saver of lives. Known for his generous good humor, he took medicine seriously, personally and individually. It was often hard. He retired in 1994.

At school, Keyvan had learned enough violin to be accepted as a student of Abolhasan Saba, widely revered as a great teacher of classical Persian and Western violin. Keyvan later wrote: “My personal therapy for stress is to retreat to my office for 20 minutes and listen to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. »

Elsie died in 2021. Keyvan is survived by Alexander, his grandchildren, Mico and Jonny, and his siblings, Minou and Chala.