Birth: 24/9/1882 Death:15/1/1964
Born in Beit Jala on 24 Sept. 1882 to a Lutheran family; studied at the Schneller School, then three years at the Dar Al-Mualimin; went in 1899 to Beirut to study Medicine at the American University of Beirut; returned to Palestine and worked at the German Deaconesses and the English Mansion Hospitals, then became Director of the Sha’arei Tsedek Hospital in Jerusalem; resumed his studies in Germany in 1912, majoring in Microscopy Bacteriology and Tropical Diseases with special instruction in Tuberculosis; returned to Jerusalem in 1913 and opened his first clinic (the only Arab clinic in Jerusalem at the time); was drafted into the Ottoman Army in 1914 and served until after the end of the WWI; then resumed his medical career; appointed as head of the Malaria Section at the International Hygienic Institute in Jerusalem and the Leper Home in Talbiyeh (later in Silwan and then in Surda near Ramallah), becoming a noted authority on leprosy; was imprisoned for his anti-Zionist and British Mandate opinions in 1939; was elected as first President of the Arab Medical Society established in Jerusalem in Aug. 1947; became member of its journal’s editorial board; lost his home in Jerusalem, his library and several manuscripts in the course of the War of 1948; after the war, worked in the various clinics established by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF); contributed to the establishment of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem and was appointed as its first medical director remaining in office until 1957 when he retired; is also remembered for his interest in the peasant society and native culture of Palestine; combined his professional medical career with collecting and documenting folkloric material; he published a number of articles on folklore, politics and medical studies in English, Arabic and German in various papers, incl. the British-Mandate-era Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society; authored several ethnographic works, incl. Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (Jerusalem: The Syrian Orphanage Press, 1927), and The Palestine Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore (Jerusalem: The Syrian Orphanage Press, 1933); collected a huge number of amulets and fear cups – mostly in lieu of payment for his treatment of patients – which are now housed permanently in the Canaan Collection at Birzeit University Library; died on 15 Jan. 1964 in the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem.
