Humanity at the heart of healthcare, says Imtiaz Sooliman
- Wits Faculty of Health Sciences
Dr Imtiaz Sooliman urged Wits health professionals to put humanity at the heart of healthcare, reminding them that compassion and dignity are as vital as clinic
Gift of the Givers founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman used the 2026 Botlhale Orenstein Memorial Lecture to remind health professionals that excellence in medicine begins with recognising the humanity of the person in front of them.
Patients entrust healthcare professionals with far more than their medical care, Dr Imtiaz Sooliman told the Wits Faculty of Health Sciences at the 2026 Botlhale Orenstein Memorial Lecture.
“Patients give their whole souls to you. They give you their bodies and they give you their secrets. They trust you,” said Sooliman. “Do you value their trust, or is it just a number?”
A medical doctor by training, Sooliman founded Gift of the Givers in 1992 and left private practice to devote himself full-time to humanitarian work. The organisation has since grown into the largest disaster-response NGO of African origin, responding to humanitarian crises in South Africa and around the world.
Delivering a lecture titled The Heart of Healthcare: Humanity in a Fractured World, Sooliman drew on more than three decades of humanitarian work to reflect on medicine, service and the responsibility that comes with caring for another person.
“If you were the patient, how would you want them to treat you? This is how you need to treat them.”
His message was simple: scientific knowledge and clinical skill matter, but so do kindness, compassion and dignity.
“Learn kindness and compassion,” he said. “Be a great human being and a great doctor.”
The lecture continues a Wits tradition stretching back to 1962, when Major General Alexander Jeremiah Orenstein delivered the inaugural lecture at the establishment of the Adler Museum of Medicine. It became the AJ Orenstein Memorial Lecture in 1974, recognising his contribution to medical and health services in South Africa’s mining industry.
Its subjects have reflected changing questions in medicine and society: tropical medicine, AIDS, traditional healing and biomedical practice, occupational disease, football and health, drones in healthcare, artificial intelligence and ethics, HIV research and COVID-19, genetics and society, and cardiovascular disease have all featured over the years. Speakers have included Sydney Brenner, Glenda Gray, Lynn Morris and Himla Soodyall.
More than six decades on, Sooliman returned the lecture to a fundamental question: how should one human being care for another?