The medical activities of the London Jews' Society in nineteenth-century Palestine.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Palestine's once busy medieval trade in medicinal substances and high standard of medical services had reached their nadir. The main reason for this was the prolonged and continuous decline of the Ottoman empire, in conjunction with serious insanitary conditions, poverty and ignorance, as well as a lack of public health facilities. In the absence of sufficient medical care over several generations, the inhabitants of early-nineteenth-century Palestine were forced to rely mainly on folk medicine, and diseases and epidemics were seen as inevitable, the result of fate or decreed by heaven. A variety of popular folk remedies had been developed, based on old medical treatises and on the medicinal substances used in ancient times, in addition to cures, charms, amulets, and incantations based on superstitious beliefs. Amulets and curative remedies were a common solution for incurable diseases, mainly mental illnesses. The terrible symptoms that accompanied such maladies led those in contact with the patient to believe that magical powers and demons caused them, and that only magical cures could therefore relieve their distress. The standard of medicine in a country can be measured by the state of the public health system, medical training and medicinal substances. In Palestine, medical science, as distinct from folk medicine, rested on the classical Hippocratic-Galenic medical methods that the Muslims had adopted and improved in the course of the Middle Ages. For most of the Ottoman period, Palestine was considered an area of marginal importance, remote from cultural or government centres, and eminent physicians avoided going there. Nevertheless, it is worth examining the practice of medicine in Jerusalem since it operated on three main levels: public medicine, community medicine, and private medicine. A fourth level, voluntary medicine, gained ground only in the course of the nineteenth century. In Jerusalem, as in other large cities of the Ottoman empire, only minimal public medical services were offered. Although intended to meet the needs of the population as a whole without discrimination by religion or nationality, these services primarily benefited the Arabs. The public hospital in Jerusalem, a successor to the medical institution of the Ayyubid Caliphate of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which functioned throughout the Ottoman period, belonged to a charitable endowment