Hassan Nemazee and the Nemazee family have long been involved with philanthropic endeavors in pursuit of advanced healthcare. Nemazee Hospital was founded by Mohamed Nemazee who was born in 1896 in Bombay, India, to Iranian parents who resided in the Far East. Nemazee spent his early years in Hong Kong, where he went to school. He was primarily a self-educated man who built a considerable fortune through a successful shipping enterprise based in Hong Kong between the two world wars.

During World War II, Nemazee was offered the post of Commercial Advisor at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which he decided to accept after the war. On his journey from Hong Kong to the U.S. he travelled through Iran. Although he had never lived there, his family was from Shiraz--the city of fabled poets--and links had been maintained over the years. As his late father had built a health-care clinic in Shiraz, Nemazee decided to rehabilitate the facility and provide it with new equipment.

It soon became apparent, however, that the public health needs of Iran transcended the scope of this project and he therefore decided to establish a new and larger facility at his own expense. But private philanthropy on a large, public scale was an alien concept in Iran, where political and religious institutions dominated, so he needed a novel approach to achieve his goal.

Nemazee understood that public hygiene and health were intimately connected. While in Tehran, he realized the city had no water works—drinking water was provided by open sewers know as jubes, with untreated wastewater spreading contagious diseases. Finding Shiraz in a similar situation, in 1945 he built the Shiraz Water Works as a preventive health measure that would function in tandem with the medical facility he planned to build. As well as a preventive health measure, the Water Works was designed to be a gainful enterprise. It would generate enough income to supplement the needs of the hospital, which would be a charitable facility offering free treatment for most patients. The Water Works could charge its customers the price of water and earn enough to allow for expansion as needed. And so it happened that piped water was available in Shiraz well in advance of Tehran.

In the meantime, Nemazee retired from his business, took up his post in Washington and married and had two children, Hassan and Susan. In Washington he developed his initial concept into an integrated plan to build a modern medical center, with a medical school and a nursing school for women, all supported by the revenues generated by the public water works. He also began to purchase several million square meters of land in Shiraz on which to situate the medical center, where construction began in late 1949.

Want to know more about Nemazee Hospital? Read these articles from The New York Times.