The Times (London)
September 29, 2012 Saturday
Edition 1; National Edition
Missionary who healed the sick of Nazareth
Melissa van der Klugt on a new biography of a Scottish doctor who
founded a hospital in the Holy Land
In the early 1860s a young doctor, trained in Edinburgh, rode up into
the remote hills around Nazareth carrying with him only his medical
instruments and a small amount of money.
Nazareth, once at the heart of Christian pilgrimage, was then a
neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire. The young medic, Pacradooni
Kaloost Vartan, found a town where the average life expectancy for a
man was 22. Though there was a population of nearly 5,000 Muslims and
Christians, the nearest doctor or hospital was as far away as Damascus
or Beirut.
In a small rented house with four beds, Vartan began to treat his
first patients. A willing Anglican priest helped him to carry out
surgery with chloroform anaesthesia and, by and by, the Edinburgh
Medical Missionary Society, which had sponsored his training, sent out
medicine and a few books, attracted by the idea of undertaking such
work in Jesus’s boyhood home.
The local population regarded him with suspicion. Traditional cures –
described by a contemporary missionary as being governed “by the
charlatanry of quacks, by superstitious practices and sorcery” –
consisted of soaking written remedies in water and drinking it, or
burning of aches and pains and using green leaves to dress open
wounds. A local barber was relied on to remove gall stones, an
operation that very few of his victims survived.
Vartan’s skilful treatment of conditions ranging from broken bones to
tumours soon attracted queues of patients and Nazareth’s first
hospital thrived. A century and a half later, despite deep practical
and political problems, it still flourishes on the hillside
overlooking the modern city and has, in its own way, become an
important place for fractious religious communities to come together.
A new book by Malcolm Billings, a BBC World Service journalist, now
explores the life of the little-known doctor and missionary whose work
has had such lasting impact on medical care in the Middle East. It is
also an observation of the political and religious changes of the
region, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the settlement of Jews
in Palestine.
Vartan was born in 1835 to an Armenian family living in
Constantinople. His father was a tailor who made a meagre living but
he was deeply religious and sent his son to an American Protestant
school, set up for Armenian boys, in the hills outside the city. It
was run by an enterprising American missionary, Cyrus Hamlin, who
taught the boys English, physics and chemistry.
When the Crimean War broke out the school’s pupils were in high demand
with the British Army. Vartan became an interpreter and set off to the
Crimea where he was at the battles of Alma and Inkerman. Billings
explores his encounters with casualties, illness and poor conditions
but also Florence Nightingale’s new hospitals – experiences, he
believes, that drove Vartan into medicine.
At the end of the war, Vartan, with references under his belt and
contacts among Scottish missionaries in Constantinople, took up
medical studies in Edinburgh. Interest in the combination of medical
and missionary work had grown and in 1861 he was sent as a doctor to
assist Christians who had been caught up in civil war in Beirut. But
on reaching the city he found a number of doctors already at work and
so he made the decision to go to Nazareth, where there was a
flourishing missionary community but little in the way of healthcare.
His companion in his life’s work was to be Mary Anne Stewart, the
daughter of a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, whom he met on
a brief return trip to Edinburgh in 1867. They were married one June
day at 1.30pm and set off for Nazareth at 4.30pm the same day.
They found several adjoining houses to create their hospital and
dispensary, which soon received 40 or 50 patients a day. By the early
1870s Vartan had set up a medical school, teaching chemistry, anatomy,
surgery and hygiene, while his wife taught English, housekeeping and
pressed wild flowers to sell to pilgrims to make money for the
hospital.
Vartan was deeply spiritual, leading prayers in the hospital twice a
day, but also entirely practical in his nature. Billings describes how
he would make his own surgical tools, sketching and designing a
prototype, or a machine for rolling bandages, perhaps remembering
Hamlin’s lessons. When he was not at work in Nazareth he was touring
villages from the north Mediterranean coast to the Golan Heights.
In the letters and reports Vartan describes his gradual medical
success (his success in religious conversions was more limited): “The
sight of the knife, when I first came here, often made the poor
patients and their friends seek my consulting room door for escape,
though its employment would have given them relief, and spared them
many nights and days of pain, but now, they not only willingly submit
to its use when necessary, but sometimes when it would be needless or
hurtful, they ask me if I would not rather employ it.”
However, the book also recounts his struggle over many years with the
Ottoman authorities for permission to build a new hospital to meet
patient numbers.
Lack of space forced him to treat patients in their homes, operating
on the floor. Others were cared for in the family home; a patient with
measles was placed in the bed of the Vartans’ son who had recently
died of the illness (five of their ten children perished). Before
Vartan died in 1908 the land for the modern hospital he had worked so
hard for was finally granted. Not long after it was opened it was
requisitioned for military use in the First World War, its roof
stripped of tiles and its main rooms used as stables.
But the Nazareth hospital survived. It is still registered in Scotland
and a great-grandson, John Vartan, is involved in its upkeep. It might
still have a Protestant ethos but the hospital is no longer run by
foreigners – instead the staff of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Druze
work side by side treating patients of all faiths.
Joseph R. Main, the hospital’s chief executive, describes its
continued unifying role in the community: “The hospital has become an
integral part of the ancestral and personal histories of families in
Nazareth. Everyone has had a relative born or treated in our hospital,
meaning that everyone – every generation – has had a personal story to
tell of their relationship with this remarkable and precious place.”
Vartan of Nazareth: Missionary and Medical Pioneer in the
Nineteenth-Century Middle East, by Malcolm Billings (Paul Holberton,
£25)
Lack of space forced him to operate on patients on the floor
From: A. Papazian