His assertiveness, honesty, discipline, and austerity most probably derived from his early Scottish high school teachers in Jerusalem, where he earned the Gibbon Memorial Prize in July 1906.

When the U.S. King-Crane Commission (created by President Woodrow Wilson to poll public opinion in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine) arrived in Beirut, he became its physician and interpreter.

Ten of his books were written in English, including Notes on Embryology (unpublished), Essentials of Urinary and Genital Disease (1946), and eight volumes of the Annual Report of the Orient Hospital (AROH) (1948–1955).

In 1947, he left AUB and founded the Orient Hospital, a fifty-four bed non-profit institution that provided free medical care to hundreds of Palestinians made refugees by the creation of the state of Israel.

"[1] He bought a house on the same block as the Orient Hospital, in a district of downtown Beirut called Haouz Saatiyeh, where he spent the last ten years of his life.

With his wife Lamia, they had 6 children: Farid (urologist and surgeon), Fuad (neurosurgeon), Brahim (engineer), Samia (pianist), Labib (mathematician) and Saad (physicist and architect).