Fever and Thirst, A Missionary Doctor Amid the Christian Tribes of Kurdistan
Gordon Taylor
Academy Chicago
The first Americans to work with the people of the Middle East were neither spies nor soldiers. They were, in fact, teachers, printers, and missionaries, of whom one was a country doctor from Utica, New York. In June of 1835 Asahel Grant, M.D., and his bride Judith sailed from Boston to heal the sick and save the world. Their destination was the town of Urmia, in northwest Iran, and their intended flock the Nestorian Christians who lived there and in the mountains of Hakkari, across the border in Ottoman Kurdistan.
Into the next eight years Grant packed ten lifetimes worth of danger, heartbreak, and exertion. He traversed deserts and glaciers, forded rivers, learned fluent Turkish and Syriac, opened schools, tended the sick and dying, confronted bandits, broke bread with thieves and murderers, and narrowly escaped death from drowning, malaria, cholera, influenza, mercury poisoning, dysentery, hypothermia, and assassination. In one year alone, he lost three-fifths of his family (including Judith) to disease.
Yet by the time his shattered body gave out, there was no one in the mountains who did not know his name and his legend, and thirty years later Kurds, Nestorians, Jews and Yedzis still spoke of "Hakim Grant” with reverence.
Gordon Taylor’s fascination with the Middle East began in the mid-1960s, when he worked as a Peace Corps teacher in Ankara, Turkey. He has spent over a decade collecting material on Asahel Grant and his work. Taylor, a waiter and avid traveler, has spent time in Turkey, Siena Leone, Greece and Israel, and now' lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.
Contents
Maps / x, xi Illustrations - Photos / 151-60
1 The Remedy / 1 2 Utica and Beyond / 5 3 Miasma / 14 4 The Last Dreams of Mahmud / 28 5 Mosul and Mesopotamia / 38 6 Into Kurdistan / 48 7 Manna and Its Heaven / 59 8 The Patriarch and the Kurd / 84 9 The Arms of Urmia / 107 10 Competition / 121 11 Critics, Snipers, and Frauds / 135 12 The Pilgrim / 161 13 Inferno / 172 14 “Inductions Dangerous” / 193 15 Demons and Angels / 203 16 “Wars and Rumors of Wars" / 215 17 The House in Asheetha / 235 18 Mr. Badger Drops In / 251 19 Holding the Tigris / 269 20 Devouring Fire / 289 21 A Long, Steep Journey / 298 22 The Monument in Asheetha / 313
Epilogue / 323 Acknowledgments / 325 Notes and Comment / 327 Bibliography / 339 Glossary / 347 Index / 349
THE REMEDY
"To the place where the sun doesn’t come, comes the doctor.” —Turkish proverb
On August 14, 1842, a man woke at dawn to find his face swollen into a bubble of pain. His beard, grown thick after months of mountain travel, probably masked the worst of the swelling; still, for one so lean of countenance this must have been a shock. A modern physician might name a dozen reasons, from food allergies to insect bites, why this could have happened; but the man had been ill for such a long time—six years, on and off, a recurrent round of vomiting and fever, broken by occasional spells of relief—that to him any new complaint must have seemed simply an extension of the old. He was not elderly—his thirty-fifth birthday was only days away—nor was he sickly by nature. Back in the United States, before he set sail for this remote corner of the Middle East, he had enjoyed the vigorous health of one raised to hard work on the family farm. But within a year after his arrival in Urmia, the town in northwest Persia where he first made his home, he had fallen ill. Only in the mountain air could he find a measure of relief.
When he felt the swelling, he identified the source immediately. That night he had slept in Chumba, a village on the river Zab, very close to what is now the border between Turkey and Iraq. His host, Malek Ismael, the chief of this Christian village, had given him the use of an arzaleh upon which to sleep. These structures, ten to fifteen feet high, were a common feature of life in the villages, where mosquitoes hatched in summer to supplant the winter’s crop of fleas. With the arzaleb, a sleeping platform set upon a framework of poles, the people sought refuge from the worst of the insects. The villages of this area abounded in water, which fed their terraced fields with torrents of melted snow falling from the mountains above. This particular arzaleh had been erected so close to such a stream that when the American climbed its rude ladder and lay down, his head rested only a few feet from a roaring cataract. The long-suffering traveler did not get wet; still, it was the proximity to dampness, he felt, that had brought on the swelling. This was no idle opinion, for the man was a physician.
Asahel Grant, M.D., a general practitioner from Oneida County, New York, was traveling in this wild border region between the Ottoman and Persian Empires under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In May 1835, aged 27 years, he had sailed from Boston with his bride, Judith, to teach the unlettered, preach the gospel, and heal the sick. Since then he had worked ceaselessly, traveling alone through mountains where the people lived in a constant state of feuding, robbery, and war. His character impressed everyone who met him, but his presence had changed this human cockpit not a jot. In fact, there is ample reason to believe that he had made matters worse. By January 1840, Grant’s wife Judith and twin baby girls—three-fifths of his family—lay buried in the mission graveyard in Urmia. Every year saw new deaths among the missionaries, some of whom were already dying when they arrived. And yet, faced by these and other losses, despite threats of robbery and murder, Grant rode on. He had not come to Hakkari, this untamed corner of Turkish Kurdistan, to allow something so trifling as a swollen face, or even so discouraging as a death, to hold him back.
On that Sunday morning Grant faced a five-hour climb to the zozan—the summer pastures—of Chumba, where Mar Shimun, patriarch of the “Nestorian” Church of the East, awaited his visit. Grant needed the patriarch’s friendship and approval; it was impossible to overstate the importance of this connection. The doctor had wearied of long marches through the mountains, so it was in the village of Asheetha, the center of a populous valley to the south, that he wanted to build a permanent home, a large house with many rooms where he and his missionary colleagues could teach and minister for the rest of their days. Through their efforts and with the patriarch’s support, the Church of the East, a tiny relic from the dawn of Christianity, would flourish again. Even the Kurds, Grant believed, might some day throw off the delusions of the False Prophet and receive the word of Jesus Christ.
When he arrived at the zozan, Grant found acres of sheep grazing amid alpine splendor. Most of the people of Chumba had retired to this summer camp in the high pastures with its invigorating air; they took shelter in crude huts made of branches or slept in the open on felt cloaks. The patriarch Mar Shimun, who occupied the only tent, gave a warm greeting to Dr. Grant, who had brought with him copies of the Psalms, printed in modern Syriac at the American mission in Urmia, the first of their kind ever produced. Mar Shimun accepted them with gratitude, and on that Sabbath afternoon he read the new books aloud as flocks grazed about them, shepherds kept watch for bears, and last winter’s snows seeped into the earth.
For six days of the week, armies of the sick and lame followed the doctor wherever he went; on this Sabbath he took time to minister to himself. We can only imagine the misery that beset him. His face remained swollen and painful; intermittent malaria drained his strength. Since 1836, when he had barely survived an attack of cholera, his stomach could retain food only fitfully. Now as a doctor, he knew one ultimate remedy for the swelling of his face.
This was neither a drug nor brandy, and certainly not a poultice or a salve. From his black bag Dr. Grant drew an object that, although no bigger than a pen, was the most potent weapon in the physician’s arsenal, used to attack all diseases, including diphtheria, malaria, and yellow fever, as well as childbirth, female disorders, and broken bones. This instrument took such precedence in the fight against disease that even today the journal of the British Medical Association bears its name. The lancet, as its name implies, resembled a tiny spear, with a double-edged blade tapering to a sharp point. It was used with small bowls to catch the blood. And surely that night, in the privacy bestowed by darkness, blood flowed freely. For his swollen face, says his biographer, Grant found relief “only by a desperate plunge of his lancet into the very roots of his teeth.” The blade, Grant admits, had struck so deeply into his gums that the labial nerve was severed, leaving his upper lip numb for nearly two weeks.
This was not the act of a madman or a quack. Grant was a competent and conscientious physician, a man who never acted with anything but the best of intentions. No one can read about his desperate thrust of the lancet without the queasy realization that little had changed since alchemists stalked the earth. In some parts of the United States, doctors continued to draw blood up to the beginning of the 20th century, and the potions they dispensed lingered even longer in their black bags and in apothecaries' chests. Such was the staying power of an illusion; such was the world of Asahel Grant.
Utica and Beyond
“And I would never travel among Christians. Christians are so slow, and they wear chimney-pot hats everywhere. The further one goes from London among Christians, the more they wear chimney-pot hats. I want Plantagenet to take us to see the Kurds, but he won’t.”
“I don’t think that would be fair to Miss Vavasor,” said Mr. Palliser, who had followed them.
"Don’t put the blame on her head,” said Lady Glencora. “Women always have pluck for anything. Wouldn’t you like to see a live Kurd, Alice?”
“I don’t know exactly where they live,” said Alice.
“Nor 1. I have not the remotest idea of the way to the Kurds ... But one knows that they are Eastern, and the East is such a grand idea!”
—Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1865)
It began with a child’s desk drawer, a wayward axe, and a life of hard work and Puritan religion. At the turn of the nineteenth century Asahel Grant’s parents, Thomas and Rachel Grant, had migrated west to New York from Litchfield County, Connecticut, an area known, wrote Rev. Thomas Laurie, Grant’s ...
Gordon Taylor
Fever and Thirst
Academy Chicago
Academy Chicago Publishers Fever and Thirst A Missionary Doctor Amid the Christian Tribes of Kurdistan Gordon Taylor
Published in 2005 by Academy Chicago Publishers 363 West Erie Street Chicago, Illinois 60610
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher
Printed and bound in the U.S.A.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data to come
Cover design by Sarah Olson Author photo by Charles Rushton Photography Cover art: Shrine of Nebbi Yunus and walls of Nineveh. Drawing by Claudius James Rich. Academy Chicago Publishers
www.academychicago.com
And there are some, whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain ... We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance! but it leads A long, steep journey, through sunk Gorges, o'er mountains in snow!
—Matthew Arnold, “Rugby Chapel” (1857)
This is the patent age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions.
