17/10/2025
This is heart. This is charity, especially when it’s given not for recognition. Thank you for all of your service from heart. 💛
Some people spend their whole lives chasing wealth. He spent his chasing something else entirely.
When everyone told him to charge more, he charged less.
Dr. Mohamed Mashally, known as the "Doctor of the Poor," dedicated over 50 years of his life to treating patients in Tanta, Egypt, charging only 5-10 Egyptian pounds ($0.30-0.60) per visit - and frequently treating people without charging any payment at all.
He worked 12-hour days even into his late 70s, serving 30-50 patients daily, and provided vaccines free of charge to those who couldn't afford them.
What drove him? Early in his career, Dr. Mashally treated a young boy with severe diabetes whose mother couldn't afford the necessary medication. The child later died after burning himself, an event that profoundly impacted him and inspired his lifelong commitment to serving low-income patients.
"I pledged to God that I would not take a penny from a poor person and that I would remain in my clinic to help the poor," he said. And he kept that promise.
Dr. Mashally credited Egypt's late president Jamal Abdul Nasser for his education: "President Abdul Nasser changed my whole life when he ordered free education. I grew up in a modest family. Without this decree, I would not have been able to get my studies."
His father had advised him to take care of the poor, and he lived by those words: "Medicine is a humanitarian mission, not a job to amass money."
When he passed away in 2020 at age 76, thousands turned out for his funeral. The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar called him a symbol of humanity who "chose to help poor and needy patients until the last day of his life."
Tributes flooded in from across the globe, with murals painted in his honor and leaders paying respects to a man who became known simply as "the Egyptian king" of compassion.
He could've built wealth. Instead, he built hope.
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