The Medical Activities of the London Jews' Society in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

trust.Its standards, like those of similar institutions, deteriorated as the Ottoman empire itself gradually declined.'It was only in 1886 that the Jerusalem municipality set up a clinic, which opened three times a week, and in 1891 that the new Municipal Hospital was erected in Sheikh Bader (today, 86 Jaffa Street, in the heart of the new city).2Until then, the inhabitants of Jerusalem had to make do with medicinal substances that had been in use throughout the region for centuries.As time passed, disruptions in trade routes brought about a decrease in the variety of available medications.The harsh economic conditions reduced the demand for exotic and expensive products, and the standards of physicians and caregivers fell.3Quinine is the only modem medicinal compound among the scores of substances mentioned in the various historical sources concerning the medical situation in Jerusalem until the beginning of the nineteenth century.This medication was prescribed at the dispensaries of the Franciscan community in Jerusalem during the first half of the eighteenth century.4As treatises on materia medica show,5 at that time new pharmaceutical agents from Africa, Asia, and America were important components of medications in Europe.In Palestine and Jerusalem, however, most medicines dispensed by authorized physicians were traditional ones, derived largely from local sources, as their plant, mineral, and animal origins indicated.6Community medicine, which gained adherents in Jerusalem, was essential for the various ethnic groups, providing a necessary alternative to the defective public health system.For religious reasons, Jews and Christians, with the permission of the Ottoman government, preferred to use the medical services provided by their own communities.Muslim almshouses, offering limited medical care, most probably existed too.7From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, the centre of community medicine for the Jews of Jerusalem was their own hospital located in the Jewish Quarter, 'Z Amar and E Lev, Rof'im u-trufot bi- Yerushalayim be-meot ha-asirit ad ha-shmonehesreh (Physicians, drugs and remedies in Jerusalem from the 10th to the 18th century), Tel Aviv, Eretz,