For decades, Dr. Michael Gilboa, a senior ophthalmologist at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital, treated people with serious eye diseases. Several days ago, when Dr. Gilboa passed away at the hospital, it was revealed that he had requested his corneas be donated to patients in need of implants.
The cornea implants were carried out at Rambam and given to two patients who suffered from eye diseases that placed their sight in danger.
Dr. Gilboa, 72 at the time of his passing, served until his retirement as head of the eye department’s unit of oculoplasty, a field that combines ophthalmology and plastic surgery and includes treatment of damage to the bones of the eye socket.
"After saving the sight of countless patients during his work as an ophthalmologist for more than 40 years, Dr. Gilboa took care to continue to save the eyes of those in need even after his death," said Prof. Yitzhak Biran, a coworker of Gilboa’s in the department.
"We salute the nobility of a person who was always and unreservedly committed to saving the eyes of those in need," said Biran, "In his death, as in his life, his hand was always extended to give and not to receive.”
Dr. Gilboa began to specialize in ophthalmology at Rambam in the 1960s and also worked at other hospitals in the north - in Poriah, Tzfat and Nahariya. At the end of the 1980s, he returned to Rambam to manage the unit for oculoplasty and work as a senior physician in the hospital’s department of ophthalmology.