Nemazee Hospital and Nemazee Family Philanthropy
Hassan Nemazee is active in several philanthropic endeavors, serving on several charitable boards.
Nemazee, and his family, have long been involved with philanthropic endeavors in pursuit of advanced healthcare. Nemazee Hospital was founded by Hassan Nemazee’s father, Mohammad Nemazee, who was born in 1896 in Bombay, India, to Iranian parents residing in the Far East. He was primarily a self-educated man who built a considerable fortune through legal and illegal opium trade, using his family's successful shipping enterprise based in Hong Kong and the network of family members who settled in various important locations throughout Asia.
The Nemazee family was trading with opium and other goods since the last decades of the 19th century. After the Chinese government prohibited the import of Iranian and Ottoman opium in 1912, the Nemazees began smuggling opium into China. The fortunes of the Nemazee family grew during the interwar period. Desperate for foreign currency, The Iranian Government ignored the international pressure to curtail its opium production and trade, though it was a signatory to the First Hague Opium Convention from 1912, and carried on with its uninhibited cultivation of opium-poppies and production of opium. The Nemazees assisted the Iranian Government by arranging the smuggling of enormous amounts of contraband opium into China during the interwar period, while the Iranian government turned a blind-eye to the large-scale smuggling activities conducted by the Nemazee family. After the abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1941, the new Iranian Government decided to begin a process that will end opium production in Iran. As a result, the Nemazees abandoned their opium business in the 1940s, although opium was still legal in Iran until 1955.
In 1953, when Nemazee Hospital and Nemazee School of Nursing were inaugurated, they were state-of-the art facilities. By this time, Nemazee had donated $10 million (equivalent to $100 million dollars today) of his own money, all derived from his shipping business in Hong Kong, to construct and maintain the medical facility and water works.
Nemazee Hospital, Nemazee School of Nursing, and surrounding facilities also indirectly laid the groundwork for the development of a full-fledged university system constructed on the American model. In 1960, Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi commissioned a study that selected Shiraz instead of Tehran as the site for an Iranian university; the primary reason was that the Nemazee medical center complex provided the best base on which to build. Shiraz University was thus created and became the most advanced, western style academic institute in the Middle East.
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