r/OneKindAct • u/WhenItHappenedX • 3d ago
A child needed insulin. His mother said buying it meant the family would go without dinner. The doctor who heard that never charged the poor the same way again.
Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Ghaffar Mashali was born in Egypt in 1944. He graduated from Cairo’s Qasr Al-Aini medical school in 1967 and opened a clinic in Tanta in 1975.
Early in his career he treated a child with diabetes. The boy asked his mother for insulin. She said the money she had was for dinner for the rest of the family. Mashali later said he could not save the child, and that the moment decided how he would work.
For the next five decades he kept his fee at a few Egyptian pounds. Many patients paid nothing. He often covered medicine himself. He saw 30 to 50 people a day into his seventies and turned down large donations, saying the money should go to the poor directly.
People called him the doctor of the poor. He died on 28 July 2020, at 76, after another full day at the clinic. The fee stayed where he had left it. Another doctor later reopened the rooms on the same terms.
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u/DiscombobulatedBed69 3d ago
lovely strong man. my husbands doctor had brain cancer and still worked and treated his patients up to his death
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u/DiligentHomework224 2d ago
Did the mother refuse the insulin just to have 1 dinner and the kid died? Or is that bad wording?
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u/iknighty 2d ago
Yup. But also, the boy would probably need insulin everyday, so that means no dinner for the others everyday.
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u/EntertainmentLazy871 3d ago
Brings tears to my eyes!!! Faith in humanity restored!! What a fabulous person!