Dr. Abdulkarim Vessal (1933-2022): A Pioneering Professor of Radiology at Shiraz Medical School, Iran

Dr. Abdulkarim Vessal was a distinguished professor of the Shiraz Medical School in south of Iran. He was born in 1933 in Shiraz. After finishing primary and high schools, he went to Germany and entered the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1957, where he studied medicine and received his MD degree (Figures 1 and 2) (1).In due course, since he was highly interested in basic science, he studied physics at the Berlin School of Science and Philosophy up to 1961 and then continued his medical training in radiology at the Berlin University and in 1965, he obtained the board certificate and practiced for few years in Germany and England and finally he returned home. In Shiraz, Dr. Vessal joined the Shiraz School of Medicine as an Associate Professor and became the Head of Radiology Department. Later, he went to the USA and continued his training in radiology at the Johns Hopkins Radiology Department as well as Vanderbilt University (1).Dr. Vessal became Professor of Radiology in 1976, a duty that continued for 40 years. He attended several international and local scientific meetings and delivered remarkable lectures (Figure 3). He was a member of Radiology Board Examination. In addition to his educational and research efforts, Dr. Vessal wrote 46 English papers in sound medical journals which are available at the PubMed database. He together with Dr. Reza Habibian also authored the first comprehensive Persian textbook on nuclear medicine, which was published by Shiraz University Press in 1976 (2).