Ahmad Kazim was the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) first surgeon and the founder and head of the department of orthopaedics at Dubai Hospital, UAE. From a family based in Dubai, he was born in Bombay, India on 15 October 1927, during the time of the British Raj. His father, Haji Abdulla, was a trader who ploughed his wares between Dubai, southern Iran and western India, and for educational reasons reared his 15 children in Bombay. When he wasn’t sailing, he practiced as a hakim (faith healer), which profoundly influenced Ahmad, who described dressing his father’s patients’ wounds using various local herbs, such as neem (azadirachta indica). Ahmad’s mother was Amina Abeddin. At last count, there are almost 70 medical doctors descended from Hakim Haji Abdulla. Ahmad attended school at the Jesuit St Xavier’s College in Bombay. His medical training was at Grant Medical College and its clinical affiliate, the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy Hospital. His time in India had a deep and permanent impact on him, with his lifetime preference for Indian food and Hindi films. The war years were difficult for the family due to restricted sea travel that ended with the destruction of Haji Abdulla’s dhow, along with the captain and the ship’s monkey, in the Bombay docks explosion of 1944. The Partition of India took place in 1947 while Ahmad was still at medical school. He described the chaos that enveloped Bombay at that time, and the desperate need for the medical students to give care. He would often say that these early life events gave him ‘nerves of steel’. With the war, Partition, and his father’s subsequent stroke, he had to find a way to pay his academic fees. His college offered awards that included the following year’s fees for those who came first in the class. He had no choice but to rank first, which he did. He qualified in 1950, from Grant Medical College, receiving the Lisboa gold medal for placing first, and the medal for clinical surgery. As a Muslim with British papers (Dubai was then a British Trucial State), he could not stay in India and there were no job opportunities in Dubai. His older brother had graduated from Grant Medical College two years earlier and had married a classmate who was from Trinidad in the West Indies, where they both had returned for work. Ahmad applied for jobs around the world, including in Abadan (Iran), Aden (Yemen) and Trinidad. His first job offer was for the post of casualty officer at the Port of Spain General Hospital in Trinidad. There he worked for several years, and later as a GP, while doing the nightshift at his brother’s nursing home. In 1955, he sailed to England to start his surgical training. He did general surgery jobs at multiple London hospitals, including Whipps Cross and St Andrew’s in Bow. In 1956, he entered an arranged marriage with the daughter of a woman whose obstructive labour was alleviated years before by Hakim Abdulla. Sultana Faruk was 16 years old and from the same Dubai community as Ahmad. The newlyweds set up home in London, where he continued with surgical jobs and Sultana trained as a radiographer at Westminster Hospital. Ahmad gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1958 and from the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1960. He ended his surgical training at the London Chest Hospital, working for Thomas Holmes Sellors and Sir Russell Brock. He was in awe of both men, as surgeons and as teachers, though Brock intimidated him. One of Ahmad’s jobs was to stand at the front door of the London Chest every morning waiting for Brock to arrive. He then had to take his coat and briefcase and follow swiftly behind him to his ward. After Brock’s Hunterian lecture in 1961, on the symbiosis of research and clinical work, he offered Ahmad a job as his research fellow. Ahmad declined, saying that he would be unable to support his wife ‘who liked nice things’ on a researcher’s wage. He was grateful for his experience doing chest surgery under the guidance of two of the world’s top chest surgeons and admitted that his time there bestowed on him a sense of fearlessness in the face of heaemorrhage. In December 1961, Ahmad returned to Trinidad. He was appointed as a consultant surgeon at the Port of Spain General Hospital, where he did most types of surgery, though leaning towards vascular and orthopaedics. He would work mornings at the hospital, including teaching medical students from the University of the West Indies, and afternoons in his private practice, where he was often paid in bags of grapefruit and pumpkins. In 1969, his house was unexplainably burned to the ground and, when Dubai joined the federation of the United Arab Emirates in the early 1970s, he finally returned home. He served in the Dubai Health Authority for many years, as head of the surgical department at Rashid Hospital, and opened the first specialist orthopaedic unit in the country at Dubai Hospital. He did general orthopaedics – everything from joint replacements and spinal surgery to paediatric procedures, such as scoliosis and talipes equinovarus, to tendon transference for poliomyelitis and trials of placenta-derived mesenchymal stem cells for cartilage repair. Later in his career, he was a lecturer at the Dubai Medical College for Girls, encouraging the students to view surgery as a viable option for women. He retired from the Dubai Health Authority in 2004, but continued his private practice until 2019, when he was in his early 90s. He had a long and happy career in surgery and rarely took a holiday that didn’t include visiting a local orthopaedic unit. During his professional life, he received many awards and accolades, including a pioneer medal presented to him by the ruler of Dubai in 2014. Posthumously, a building in Dubai Healthcare City was named in his honour, adjacent to buildings carrying the names of Al Razi and Ibn Sina. In his later years, he started an organic farm, experimenting with natural pesticides, which interestingly included neem. Ahmad had his first stroke in 2019 and so started his slow exit. He died at Rashid hospital, where he had been head of surgery, on 10 October 2021 at the age of 93. He was survived by his wife, Sultana, daughters Houriya (a breast surgeon) and Sherine, son Eskander and five grandchildren.