Egypt’s Magdi Yacoub on life as the maverick surgeon who came in from the cold

An outsider from the start, the cardiac specialist known affectionately as ‘Prof’ talks about winning over the British establishment

It is not often that Prof Sir Magdi Yacoub finds himself as the patient prone on an operating trolley looking up into the face of a surgeon instead of being on the other side of proceedings.

The scenario, though, played out recently when the pioneering cardiothoracic specialist went under the scalpel to have his left hip replaced after slipping while pushing a luggage cart through Rome’s Fiumicino airport.

Yet Yacoub, 87, who has arguably touched more hearts with his “magic hands’’ than anyone else in the world, was not the least bit perturbed by the reversal in positions of trust.

“It’s a privilege, almost, to be at the receiving end,” he tells media. “It is a massive responsibility, the patient-doctor relationship. I consider it sacred. It’s very important for me to know how patients feel. Sometimes we take it for granted.”

The injury occurred when, delayed by a throng of admirers keen to take a selfie with the Egyptian-born heart surgeon known affectionately as “Prof’’, he was rushing to reach passport control.

“I always say that people think of surgeons as heroes. We’re not at all. We are applying what is, in effect, a very noble profession, to the community,” he says. “And the community thinks that we’re fantastic. We are just the vehicle.”

Diagnosis of the fracture that led to the surgery in London took two weeks, the most painful period in Yacoub’s long memory, leaving him so discombobulated by painkillers that “it made me wonder if I wanted to live any more”.

Fast forward seven weeks from the operation and he has just returned from Egypt after one of his regular trips to the heart centre he founded in Aswan, having been passed fit to travel thanks to a rigorous regime of physiotherapy.

When we met last month, he was walking with the aid of crutches into his office at Harefield, the former village hospital in Hillingdon that over decades he transformed into a transplant centre of international renown.

Asked about success, Yacoub modestly puts much of his own down to P, P and H. “Passion,” he says, by way of explanation. “You should really believe in what you’re doing.

“Second P: Persistence. And, finally, H for humility, because humility is very important in being able to talk to the most desolate patient or individual on planet Earth, or to royalty or the most intelligent person. You have to be humble.”

Despite his best efforts to throw off the heroic mantle, he is nonetheless internationally revered; nowhere more so than in the land of his birth where a mural in the Nile delta province of Sharqia immortalises Egypt’s two favourite, albeit contrasting, sons, Yacoub and footballing great Mo Salah.

“I am uncomfortable with the attention,” he says. “I’m only doing my duty. I am a very ordinary man who loves his family, loves food, loves life, but equally takes his job very seriously.”

He continues to drive forward the search for novel treatments and techniques in the state-of-the-art on-site laboratories at The Magdi Yacoub Institute.

There, scientists are hard at work trying to grow living heart valves and organs from a scaffold of stem cells, and explore the potential for gene editing to combat cardiac failure.

“I feel more and more enthusiastic the more I learn,” he says. “I always look forward to the next day to find out what new things I can think about.”

As the conversation turns to the subject of A Surgeon and a Maverick, his authorised biography, a line of commendations, mementoes, photographs and statuettes on a windowsill stands testament to the distinguished life he has led.

One figurine is particularly conspicuous: a rendering of Imhotep, known as the first physician, a non-royal Egyptian belatedly deified for his skills as a healer centuries after he died circa 2611 BC.