A new biography tells the story 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